1925 war movie
Rating: 17/20
Plot: Three young men enlist and shuffle off to Europe to fight in World War I.
War movies isn't my favorite genre, but this is a really good one. It doesn't seem all that difficult to humanize characters who are going off to war; it can be done with cliche and melodrama. Here, King Vidor humanizes a tobacco-chewing laborer, a stocky bartending bull of a man, and a rich kid about as naturally as you're likely to see in a movie from the mid-20s. Vidor takes the time to make these characters, their friendships, and their romantic feelings very real before he spends time dehumanizing war. Scenes where characters are bonding over a chunk of cake or courting with a barrel over a head go beyond just being cute and really make these characters authentic enough to really care about.
The first half of the movie has a heartbreaking romantic subplot that really becomes the central plot. It's sweet, the intertitles struggling to show us how much of an obstacle language is. John Gilbert is fine as our main character, a love-struck soldier, and Renee Adoree is just cute enough to fall in love with even though you can't understand a word she says. It's typical silent romance fodder, but it works here because it clashes so violently with the final hour of the movie.
That final hour is almost all war. Plane action! Explosions! Falling trees! The war strategy--marching through the woods and getting shot at--never made sense to me, but the scenes showing the violence and terror of the battlefield were enthralling. It really shows that contemporary filmmakers, like Mel Gibson with Hacksaw Ridge, haven't done much to improve on what was being done in this silent war drama. It looked like archive footage a lot of the times, but I'm pretty sure it was all movie magic.
There are lots of great shots and scenes in this one--the training, focusing on soldier faces during some marching, enthusiasm and apprehension and pride; a red cross cutting through the grays of 1920's film; a scene with Gilbert and an enemy soldier and a cigarette; a dilapidated town, maybe a set and maybe leftover destruction from the actual Great War; a zoom to a mother's expression; a line of silhouetted refugees; a make-shift hospital with streams of angelic light; a heroic, limping return that almost looked animated to me. So much stands out and makes the war and romance narratives, which are really nothing that we haven't seen in the last 90 years, something that will stick with me for a while.
Most of the intertitles for this movie were lyrics for "We're in the Army Now."
I thought this was early for the MGM lion, but then I remembered (or maybe I looked up) that its first appearance was before He Who Gets Slapped, a movie I saw earlier this year. It's strange seeing the lion without an audible growl.
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