The Big Parade
Midnight weekend screenings happen on Friday & Saturday nights (meaning arrive on Friday and/or Saturday night by 11:45pm for seating, the movie starts after midnight)!
Director: King Vidor Run Time: 151 min. Format: Audio Amplification Available Release Year: 1925
Starring: Claire Adams, Claire McDowell, Hobart Bosworth, John Gilbert, Renée Adorée
Celebrate Silent Movie Day with the 100th anniversary screening of the epic & landmark film The Big Parade with a live piano film score. An important anti-war film, The Big Parade was one of the highest grossing films of the silent era.
Before The Big Parade, war films leaned into glory & patriotism. The Big Parade instead showed the gritty, devastating human cost, and realities like muddy trenches, fear, injuries, and PTSD. The realism struck audiences hard, especially since the WW1 was so recent.
Chad Hunter from the Pittsburgh Silent Film Society and Wendy Whittick from the Pittsburgh Classic Movie club will both give short talks to add context to the film, and pianist Jeff Rapsis, a Boston based pianist with a specialty in silent film scores, will perform live with the film.
This event is sponsored by The Pittsburgh Classic Movie Club.
The film: The story of an idle rich boy who joins the US Army’s Rainbow Division and is sent to France to fight in World War I, becomes friends with two working class men, experiences the horrors of trench warfare, and finds love with a French girl.
In 1992, The Big Parade was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
