The first major American war film about World War I since D.W. Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918) and a key film in the development of the genre, King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) effectively blended a punishing spectacle of warfare with the personal trials of one American doughboy. Based on a story by What Price Glory? scribe Laurence Stallings, and starring John Gilbert as the soldier, The Big Parade was originally intended to be a smaller production. When MGM exec Irving Thalberg saw the footage of improvised vignettes like a battlefield rapprochement between Gilbert and a dying German soldier, however, he urged Vidor to expand the film. The move paid off, as The Big Parade was lauded for the landmark realism of its battle scenes and the sensitive love story between Gilbert and Renée Adorée's French girl, establishing Vidor and the newly merged MGM studio's artistic prestige. The biggest box office hit of the 1920s, The Big Parade played for 86 straight weeks in New York and confirmed Gilbert's place as one of the top stars of the decade. It remained MGM's biggest moneymaker until (what else?) 1939's Gone With the Wind.