"When the United States enters World War I, three young men from New York end up in the same company – a construction worker, a bartender, and Jim Apperson, son of a wealthy manufacturer. After boot camp, the company is shipped to the French village of Champillon, where Jim falls in love with farmer’s daughter Melisande. Once sent to the front, amid the craters of no-man’s-land, they experience the full horror of war … The characters seem at first almost to develop as if in a rural romance film, but in the second part, they are quickly ground to a pulp. Told from Jim’s perspective, The Big Parade puts average soldiers at the centre of the story. As King Vidor put it, “he wasn’t a hero. He was just a guy who went along, and watched, and observed, and reacted”. As the second-highest grossing silent film of all time, it established MGM as a major studio. Its radical naturalism, which did not shy from showing the humanity of opponents of war, was a key influence on anti-war films that followed. For King Vidor, it was the opening salvo in a trilogy of films on his cardinal leitmotifs of “war, wheat, steel”, to be rounded out by Our Daily Bread and An American Romance." 2020 Berlinale