King Vidor's 1925 Silent "Big Parade" Comes to Blu-ray Warner Bros. Entertainment Hobart Bosworth, left, and John Gilbert in King Vidor's "Big Parade" (1925), new on Blu-ray from Warner Home Video. At this moment, there's probably no better way of dispelling the tiresome myth that silent films were technically and dramatically crude than by directing skeptics to the radiant new Blu-ray of "The Big Parade" from Warner Home Video. Directed by King Vidor, and originally released by MGM in November 1925, this tale of three buddies caught up in what then was called the Great War was one of the most financially successful films of the silent era. It played for almost two years at the Astor Theater in New York and enjoyed similar success worldwide. John Gilbert and Renée Adorée in the 1925 wartime drama "The Big Parade," directed by King Vidor. Today, the film remains a heartfelt but shrewdly judged blend of comedy, romance, action and tragedy - a movie that perfectly embodies the classical Hollywood ideal of providing something to appeal to every member of what, in the 1920s, was a wide public still unsevered by demographic categories. "The Big Parade" also happens to be one of the relatively few silent features for which the original negative still exists. That's something of a miracle, given the general rule that, the more popular a film was, the more likely it is to have come down to us in compromised versions. In the early days of the medium, it was common for projection prints to be made directly from the actual film that passed through the camera, which resulted in copies of great brilliance and detail. But as those camera negatives were used and reused, they gradually disintegrated, which meant that new prints could only made by duplicating old prints. The inevitable result was a loss of contrast and definition, and the transference of accumulated dirt and scratches from one generation to the next. The original photographic qualities are muted and compromised, and what remains can often seem a dim, jittery, striated mess, quite often projected at the wrong speed. Such were the "flickers" that so many people first encountered on television, and understandably preferred never to encounter again. If "The Big Parade," in this new edition, looks nearly as fresh and fully dimensional as a vintage print by the photographers Walker Evans or Berenice Abbott, it's thanks in part to a clerical error. In 1931, MGM reissued two of the studio's biggest hits of the silent era - "The Big Parade" and "Ben-Hur" (also from 1925) in new versions with synchronized music and sound effects. The studio made a duplicate negative for the sound version, one that actually contained less visual information than the silent negative, because of the additional space on the 35-millimeter filmstrip taken up by the optical soundtrack. Eventually, both negatives ended up in the collection of George Eastman House in Rochester. But as the film historian Kevin Brownlow was to discover during a visit to Eastman House in 1997 - a story he relates in his extensive notes for the new Blu-ray edition - the cans had been mislabeled somewhere along the way. What archivists believed to be the superior silent version was in fact the sound version, which had been the source of all circulating prints. But the silent version was there, too, sitting unmolested in the cans marked as "sound" - patiently waiting, one can only assume, for humanity to develop the digital technology needed to create the 4K scan that is the basis of the current edition. Just three months shy of his 32nd birthday, when "The Big Parade" had its premiere in Los Angeles, Vidor was not much older than the cinema itself - a young man working in a young art form. Like his near contemporaries Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, Vidor was a member of the first generation to grow up with movies as an established narrative form rather than as a tent-show novelty. With this generation came the first hints of self-consciousness in regard to style; the problem was no longer how to tell a story but how to tell a story in your own voice. "The Big Parade" follows a formula that may now seem familiar, if only because it has been imitated so often. The three main characters are drawn from different walks of life: Bull (Tom O'Brien) is an Irish bartender from the Bowery; Slim (Karl Dane) is a Scandinavian immigrant driving rivets atop Midtown skyscrapers; and Jim (John Gilbert) is a Long Island lounge lizard and mama's boy, who lives in fear of his stern father (Hobart Bosworth). When the United States enters World War I in 1917, the men are swept up by patriotic fervor and deposited in a dusty training camp. Interestingly, Vidor skips over the training scenes that would later form the basis of so many military comedies, rushing his heroes straight to war-torn France, where they are billeted in Champillon, a small village in the Marne.