“War has always been a very human thing,” King Vidor has written, and his 1925 classic The Big Parade, a war epic on the grand scale, was also an intimate anti-war film that viewed the conflagration through the eyes of its hapless victims. John Gilbert had one of the key roles of his career as the rich American boy who enlists because it's the thing to do and then suffers war's meaningless agonies alongside his less affluent buddies. Sentiment is mixed into the spectacle in the portrayal of his love for a French peasant girl (Renée Adorée), and the film's “blatant sentimentality” has been noted by some film historians. But no one contests the effect of Vidor's extraordinary mise-en-scene: the movement of men and machines, choreographed into a dramatic “march of death,” and battle scenes which remain some of the most realistic in all of cinema.