The Big Drive (A. L. Rule) shows the cinema as an instrument for recording history. It is a war picture compiled from newsreels and from films which the producer secured from the files of the U. S., British, French, Italian, German and Austrian Governments. Some of these are routine shots of German troops marching through Belgian villages, of ten-inch guns firing through underbrush, of U. S. troopships leaving their docks, of George V reviewing his soldiers.
If The Big Drive offered nothing more sensational it would remain an interesting cinema document, but it contains also a number of sequences which are less reminiscent of propaganda newsreels released during the War: a mangled soldier being carried into a front line dressing station and coming out with both legs gone; an old Belgian woman sitting in a shell-hole beside the corpse of a soldier and snivelling into his hat; hand-to-hand trench fighting in which, although the photography is somewhat blurred, it is possible to see a real bayonet go through a real soldier; a squad of U. S. infantry going over the top into machine gun fire; a zeppelin picked out by searchlights over England; a chaplain walking through an evacuated battleground, making rapid gestures over minced bodies. There are good sequences of Italian soldiers scampering wildly in retreat across a bridge under shell fire; prisoners lolling about and scratching themselves in a barbed wire paddock; the bombardment of Ypres; a German officer burning his tongue on a spoonful of soup in Brussels in the summer of 1914. Some of the performers in The Big Drive are Lord Kitchener. Elsie Janis. Baron Manfred von Richthofen. Clemenceau. the Crown Prince, Tsar Nicholas of Russia. Producer Albert L. Rule, who was a private in the American Expeditionary Forces, accompanies his picture with a lecture which should have been composed by someone else.
When The Big Drive was given a test run in Chicago last month it surprised cinema tradesmen by filling the McVicker's theatre for over two weeks. Hollywood producers, unable to comprehend that the cinema can be a medium for anything except drama, will be startled if. as is likely, The Big Drive repeats its success elsewhere. Producer Rule claims to have compiled his picture as peace propaganda of much the same brand as George Palmer Putnam's grisly collection of war photographs entitled The Horror of It (TIME, March 21).
One of the tricks which First Division Exchanges, Inc., distributors, advises exhibitors to use for publicizing The Big Drive: "On opening night, have supposedly shell-shocked veteran simulate a seizure. Use this as a basis of letters to editors of all newspapers, arraigning the idea of bringing back the horrors of war. Follow up with a dozen letters from legionnaires, etc. defending the picture as an argument for peace. . . ."
Der Hauptmann von Kopenick