The Big Parade is remembered as the first great anti-war film and the first to treat U.S. intervention in World War I with any degree of realism. It's less and more than that. Commercially, it was King Vidor's breakthrough, after twenty back-to-back features in the six years before 1925. The film's success-it ran for two years at New York's Astor Theatre-fully established Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, conglomerated only the year before. But if the title The Big Parade is ironic, it's not all that ironic. The horrors of the first modern war are secondary to a coming-of-age tale: one pampered, rich American matures through extremes of male, female, and family trust made possible only by war itself. Vidor began with a passive hero: "I was playing with the idea that the man caused nothing in this film-he only reacted." John Gilbert, ever keen to subvert his matinee idol image, gives a wide-ranging performance, comic, bitter, and accepting. Looking creakier now is the heavy slap- stick as Gilbert billets in a French village, where he meets Renée Adorée, who-as working peasant, as European, as woman-is in every way his antithesis and challenge. The "Great War" brings several of Vidor's most unforgettable sequences: the lovers' parting, the march through Belleau Wood, and the hand-to-hand fighting in mortar craters. We begin tonight with a more bellicose angle on World War I in the earliest surviving fragment of Vidor's work, from the two-reeler Bud's Recruit. Released in 1918 while the U.S. was still recruiting, its child-hero is a paragon of wartime virtues, much to the annoyance of his peace-activist mother and his shirking brother. Scott Simmon