PRESERVED FILMS

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 UCLA Film & Television Archive, with video tinting reproducing the original print colors; 2 reels. New Music: Martin Marks, score and piano; Dawn Perlner, violin. Commentary: Jere Guldin. Running Time: 26 minutes.

This two-reel World War I home-front story is the earliest surviving film from King Vidor, who would direct MGM’s World War I epic The Big Parade in 1925. The small-scale Bud’s Recruit, released in January 1918 in the middle of America’s involvement in the war, is a comic but pointed tale about a boy who sets an unyieldingly patriotic example against his draft-age brother and peace-society mother.

This was also the first film from the short-lived Boy City Film Company, managed by Judge Willis Brown, former justice of the Utah juvenile court and founder of remedial “Boy Cities” in several states. The “cities” sheltered as many as 1,000 homeless boys and were run so as to teach citizenship and democracy, with boy mayors, boy city councils, and such functioning institutions as the Boyville Banks.

Judge Brown’s experience as a film producer went back to the (now-lost) early feature-length docudrama A Boy and the Law (1914), starring a teenage Jewish immigrant enacting his own life story: Fleeing oppression in Russia, he tangles with the law in Salt Lake City, finds redemption under Brown’s guidance, and is elected mayor of Salt Lake’s Boy City. The stated goal of the Boy City Film Company, which had both a small filmmaking studio and a 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 23-year-old Vidor directing at least 10 two-reelers from Brown’s scenarios for release between January and May 1918. Except for this first release, all included an appearance by the judge, who would be portrayed hearing boys’ problems and helping resolve them. (In Bud’s Recruit we see him only in a still photo on the opening title card.) Almost all of the other Boy City Film Company productions are lost, but from descriptions it’s evident that those Vidor directed included fascinating social content: The Chocolate of the Gang (January 1918) is about boys in an all-white club who make life hard for an African American boy before they learn to accept him; I’m a Man (May 1918) is another home-front story, about a German American boy who proves his parents are more loyal to the United States than is a fake Frenchman. For Judge Brown, children carried an innate morality—an idea underlying and structuring Bud’s Recruit. In his 1915 essay “The Boy Problem,” Brown argued, “Boys do not need to be saved. They are saved…. It was to adults that Christ said, ‘Unless ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.’… I would rather trust a case of mine to the judgment of a jury of boys than of men.”

At the opening of the film, Bud drills neighborhood kids into a crack fighting unit against a scarecrow labeled KIZER. But at his well-off, apparently fatherless home, he will have to struggle and scheme to bring his family into line. His comically effete older brother, Reggie, is introduced learning from the newspaper of his low draft number (“tenth from last,” he brags later), and thus his mother and “sweetheart,” Edith, can reasonably expect that he’ll be able to avoid the fight. The film also depicts the genuine volunteers. More than 2 million additional men enlisted, and Reggie is contrasted with Edith’s sister’s boyfriend, a “khaki clad hero” who has chosen to sign up after not being drafted.

Bud disrupts his mother’s “Peace Society” parlor meeting, where Vidor pokes fun at the women’s personal propensity for violence and where Reggie is too feminized to pass muster with his sweetheart. In the real world, such feminist groups as the Women’s Peace Party had been among the earliest to campaign against U.S. involvement in the war. But the coupling of war with traditional manhood was not dead, and Wilson used his June 1917 draft registration day speech to evoke “the old spirit of chivalric gallantry.” Bud’s red-tinted dream of flag-waving valor is not so far from ideas still being propounded—far from the European trenches.

Bud also annoys his mother by refusing dinner. His explanation that it’s “a meatless day” promotes the campaign of Herbert Hoover’s U.S. Food Administration, which instituted voluntary “Meatless Mondays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays” as a way around rationing and which publicized its plans in posters such as those Bud displays in his bedroom: “Food is Ammunition—don’t waste it!” The film industry did its part too, agreeing to use fake food on movie sets.

As a low-budget, independent short, Bud’s Recruit was not widely reviewed, but the leading trade journal, Moving Picture World, found it a “pleasing patriotic offering” with “considerable humor.” In his autobiography Vidor recalled of the Judge Brown series, “I deeply believed in these films and I put my heart and soul into making them.” His later World War I masterpiece, The Big Parade, opens with characters loosely resembling those in Bud’s Recruit: an overly doting mother and her draft-age, slacker son (John Gilbert), who surprises both himself and his family by enlisting. But seven years had given Vidor, and America, time to come to a darker understanding of the price exacted for patriotism. Vidor’s only previous experience directing had been at his own tiny Texas company, but Bud’s Recruit already shows his ease in mixing character satire into drama and then in knowing just when to pull back from comedy—as in the surprisingly moving close of this little film.—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 then completing her Ph.D. at New York University.

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 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 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.

About the Archive
UCLA Film & Television Archive is home to the largest university-based collection of motion pictures and television programs in the world. UCLA documents the growth and influence of the American film and broadcast industry and collects examples showing the range of studio and independent production as well as technological breakthroughs. Its collection includes approximately 275,000 films and TV programs as well as the Hearst Metrotone News Collection—some 27 million feet of unedited film footage and complete newsreels produced between 1900 and the closing years of the Vietnam War.

UCLA is renowned for its restoration work. It has rescued treasures illustrating early uses of sound and color in film, including Vitaphone sound-on-disc shorts and features and two innovative films by Rouben Mamoulian, the all-talking Applause (1929) and Becky Sharp (1935), the first feature produced in three-strip Technicolor. Working with the Hollywood studios, UCLA has returned to the screen earlier versions and director’s cuts of such American classics as Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) and John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946). It has also saved important independent productions such as John Cassavetes’ first feature, Shadows (1959), and The Night of the Hunter (1955), the only film directed by Charles Laughton. The archive operates a study center and an active exhibition program and provides support for UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies Program.

About the Commentator
Jere Guldin is Film Preservationist at UCLA Film & Television Archive, where he has worked since 1984. An expert in animation, he is Director of the Animation Preservation Project for the International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood, and has written and spoken widely on the subject. Mr. Guldin assisted in the telecine transfer of a number of films in the Treasures series.