To me, this movie is perfection.

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

John Gilbert (a favorite of mine) is so funny, tragic, and REAL in this film. I really felt for his character (Jimmy). The first night he's away from his comfortable home, I could see the loneliness and longing in his face. The battle scenes were extraordinary - the musical score really captured the chaos and destruction of war. The scenes with the fireworks and explosions with all those men dying were breathtaking and heart wrenching. My favorite scene is when Gilbert is hitting on the French girl by the creek and he keeps stroking his finger up and down her arm and trying to kiss her. He's so nonchalant about it as if it came naturally and was improvised. I found myself smiling and softly laughing at the tender scene. That's really fine acting when a performer can make a small scene stand out like that. To me it is more memorable than the highly dramatic scene when Jimmy is out on the battlefield screaming that the Germans have killed his friend and sets out to kill the enemy - still a wonderfully acted scene, but the former just help to enforce my opinion of Gilbert as one of the finest actors ever to grace the silver screen.One scene that tugs at my heart is when Jimmy returns home and sees his mother for the first time on crutches, minus his leg. Didn't you get tense too, as the young doughboys make the march through that field with all the snipers in the trees? I also like the scene where he gives gum to Renee Adoree and she's never chewed it before. Very cute! She was another who couldn't survive the transition to sound, not because of her voice, but because of tuberculosis with which she was diagnosed in 1930. She didn't follow doctor's orders and died of the disease in 1933.Highly recommended. It's one of the only silent films that Warner Brothers has bothered to press rather than burn to DVD in the post-DVD era, and I am grateful for that.

Anybody that doubted John Gilbert's acting talents needs to watch this classic silent film from Director King Vidor.Gilbert plays James (why do I have to work) Apperson, a poor little rich boy the son of wealthy parents (Hobart Bosworth, Claire McDowell). His industrious brother Harry (Robert Ober) is following in his father's footsteps as a hard working manager in their father's business. James' girlfriend Justyn (Claire Adams) encourages James to enlist in the army when WW1 is declared.More or less shamed into enlisting he joins up with his two buddies Bull (Tom O'Brien) a bartender, and Slim (Karl Dane) a construction worker who are shipped off to France. At first the boys are not sent into combat. They spend their idle time among the locals and James meets and falls in love with local girl Melisante (Renee Adoree).Finally the boys are sent off into combat and there is a heart wrenching scene between James and Melisande as he leaves for the fighting. When the scene shifts to the battlefield we are treated to some of the best battle scenes ever filmed. There is the slow march through a forest amid sniper's bullets and later battlefield sequences without equal. The boys move from enthusiastic enlistees to the brutal reality of war including experiencing some tragic consequences.It is in these scenes that we see Gilbert's acting talent come to the fore. Especially memorable is his scene in a fox hole with a dying German soldier. Gilbert moves effortlessly from a spoiled rich kid, to a fun loving inexperienced soldier, to a battle hardened veteran. It seems a shame that Gilbert's career started to spiral downward only a few short years later.Keep the Kleenex handy for the closing scenes.

King Vidor's big break (though not his first film, by a long shot) remains one of the best WWI movies ever made. It does take a long time to get to its best stuff, though. The first 90 minutes, while hardly bad, made me wonder where its reputation was coming from. John Gilbert plays a loafer who is kind of forced to join the war by his overzealous fiancée (Claire Adams). While waiting for something to happen in France, he falls for a French girl (Renee Adoree). The scene where he teaches her to chew gum is classic, but I was a bit annoyed by Gilbert's comic relief buddies (Tom O'Brien and Karl Dane). Dane in particular looks like a gigantic Howdy Doody come straight from Hell. Both of these guys are just unfunny, and there's even a bit of a rapey vibe whenever they get around Adoree. Fortunately, when the actual fighting starts, the two become quite heroic and the film just gets a Hell of a lot better. First, there's a huge, beautiful sequence where the troops are moving out and Adoree tries desperately to find Gilbert. The next great sequence - in fact, one of the best sequences I've ever seen - has the soldiers slowly progressing through a forest while snipers take them out (a little plink on a violin string and a guy in the background falls down). This sequence gets more and more horrifying as it goes along. The film never surpasses those two sequences, but it's great for the remainder.

King Vidor's World War I drama, from a story by WWI vet and distinguished playwright Laurence Stallings, was made for only $250,000 and looks like a zillion, with huge battle sequences, an enormous cast, and expressive art direction. The extended battle is great, capturing the terrifying immediacy of war nearly as well as "All Quiet on the Western Front" (but the latter must be counted as the greater achievement, what with hauling all that primitive sound equipment around the set). John Gilbert is quite good here, with expressive but not overemoting eyes, and Renee Adoree is a spirited, pretty love interest. But Stallings--who wrote another terrific WWI story, "What Price Glory"--makes some simple mistakes that wouldn't have been difficult to repair. When we first meet Gilbert, he's a spoiled rich boy, uninterested in defending his country ("I already have enough of a war on my hands with Dad," goes a title card). He enlists solely to impress his uninteresting girlfriend. Then, in France, he forgets her instantly and falls in love with Adoree, despite his lack of French and her lack of English. I'm always annoyed at simple lust being passed off as The Real Thing in movies. Then, having created a love triangle, Stallings introduces a third-act resolution I won't spoil here, but is a mighty contrived way of clearing the path so that Gilbert can have his true love at fadeout. His two war buddies, The Regular Guy (Tom O'Brien) and The Lovable Gap-Toothed Idiot (Karl Dane), are so straitjacketed by their simple personas that they quickly wear out their welcome, and the comedy among these three brothers in battle (oddly, they practically never seem to interact with anyone else in their unit) is feeble. This was the most successful silent film to come out of Hollywood, and plenty of it is impressive, but it's encumbered by elementary screen writing mistakes.