Bud's Recruit (1918)
We hope you will enjoy the following film. Please consider making a donation so that we can continue preserving films and presenting them on our Web site. Thank you!
The film will start in 0 seconds.
CLIP FROM
Film Notes
Bud’s Recruit (1918)
Production Company: Boy City Film Co. (General Film Co., distributor). Producer/Writer: Judge Willis Brown. Director: King Vidor. Cast: Wallis Brennan (Bud Gilbert), Robert Gordon (Reggie Gilbert, his older brother), Ruth Hampton (Edith, Reggie’s sweetheart), Mildred Davis (Edith’s sister). Transfer Note: Copied at 19 frames per second from a 35mm negative preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with video tinting reproducing the original print colors; 2 reels. New Music: Martin Marks, score and piano, and Dawn Perlner, violin. Running Time: 26 minutes.
This two-reel home-front story, the earliest surviving film from King Vidor, is a pointed World War I tale about a boy who sets a patriotic example for his family. It is also the first film from the Boy City Film Company of Judge Willis Brown, former Utah juvenile court justice and founder of “Boy Cities” for the homeless. The goal of the company, which ran a studio and homeless shelter in Culver City, California, was to make “clean, wholesome, and highly entertaining stories in which the captivating humor of boy life plays a prominent part.” The films were rapidly produced, with the Vidor directing at least ten in early 1918. Except for this one, all included the judge.
Although Bud has molded neighborhood kids into a fighting unit, he must struggle bring his family into line. His effete draft-age brother shirks military duty. His mother is annoyed by Bud’s disruption of her “Peace Society” meeting and refusal of dinner on “a meatless day.” Voluntary “Meatless Mondays” were a way around wartime rationing and promoted self-sacrifice through posters like the ones displayed in the film. (Vidor’s World War I masterpiece, The Big Parade (1925), opens with a similar doting mother and her initially slacker son. But seven years had given Vidor, and America, time to come to a darker understanding of the price exacted for patriotism.) Of the Judge Brown series, Vidor wrote, “I deeply believed in these films and I put my heart and soul into making them.”—Scott Simmon
About the Music
This witty, action-packed comedy cried out for a piano and violin, two instruments that can play in dialogue, embellish each other’s parts, create sweet harmonies, and produce a full, rich sound. For the violin I recruited Dawn Perlner, an MIT graduate working on her Ph.D. at New York University. (Dawn performs the solo in The Voice of the Violin, in program 1, and played with me on the More Treasures anthology.)
About a quarter of the score uses dramatic pieces arranged for violin and piano—the most important being “Military Scene (for Scenes in Camp, Trench or ‘Over the Top’)” by Christopher O’Hare (no. 10 in the series Ditson’s Music for the Photoplay, Oliver Ditson, 1918). The piece opens with simulated drumbeats and bugle calls and enters the score as Bud begins to blow his own instrument. The march tunes that follow have just the right kind of happy enthusiasm for the boys’ military games. The rest of the score draws from popular songs, marches, action pieces, and traditional American tunes, in all sorts of guises. (There is also an operatic favorite from Bizet’s 1875 opera Carmen—the “Toreador Song,” in a horribly abused form.) Only three songs need to be identified here, to add to their effect. The gavotte “When You’re Pretty and the World Is Fair” from Victor Herbert’s operetta The Red Mill (1906) makes an irresistibly effete choice as Reggie’s introductory theme. The other songs are the World War I hits “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile!” (words by George Asaf, music by Felix Powell; Chappell, 1915) and George M. Cohan’s “Over There” (1917). So perfectly do the two songs fit the breakneck pacing of the final sequence that I can’t imagine how silent musicians could not have played them. The final shots, including the compassionate last word from the family’s black servant, are indeed surprisingly moving and wistful. These are accompanied by “The Star-Spangled Banner” and some music in a more modern style—a farewell to Bud, in all his innocent glory.—Martin Marks
About the Preservation
Bud’s Recruit was preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive from an original print donated by Terry B. Lent. Funding was provided by Society of Cinephiles and the Silent Society of Hollywood Heritage Inc.