Cavalcade

I enjoyed this film, not so much as a piece of entertainment that still holds up today, but as a moment frozen both in time and geography. Unlike "42nd Street" and "Dinner at Eight" which are other films from 1933 that I think most Americans would find very accessible today, you might not care for Cavalcade if you don't know what to look for.

This film is totally British in its perspective and it is also very much in the anti-war spirit that pervaded movies between 1925 and 1935 as WWI came to be seen by nearly all its global participants as a pointless war and caused everyone to lose their taste for fighting another.

The British perspective that you have to realize is that the Marryotts are accustomed to being on top - both in the world as England had dominated the globe for centuries, and socially, as they were part of the aristocracy. That didn't mean that they were snobs - they were very friendly and compassionate with their servants. But the point is, they were accustomed to the relationship being their choice and under their control. Suddenly England appears to be on the decline on the world stage and the servants they were so kind to are coming up in the world on their own and don't need their permission to enter society. Downstairs is coming upstairs, like it or not.

Downstairs is personified in this film by the Bridges family, Marryot servants that eventually strike out on their own and into business. Eventually the daughter, Fanny, enters into a romance with the Marryot's younger son. When Mrs. Marryot learns the news she is not so shocked as she is resigned to the fact that this is another sign that her world is slipping away. As for Fanny Bridges, she seems to personify post-war decadence as she grows from a child to full womanhood in the roaring 20's. At one point in the film, as a child, she literally dances on the grave of a loved one. This is not a good sign of things to come.

If the movie has a major flaw it is that it goes rather slowly through the years 1900 through 1918 and flies through the last fifteen years. Through a well-done montage you get a taste for what British life was like during that time - in many cases it looks like it was going through the same growing pains as American society during that same period - but it's only a taste.

Overall I'd recommend it, but just realize that it is quite different in style from American films from that same year.

The Marryot family is the focus of Noel Coward's antiwar film, "Cavalcade," made in 1933 and starring Diana Wynyard, Clive Brook, Una O'Connor, and Margaret Lindsay.

This is an upstairs-downstairs look at the effects of war, and war's effects on society as we see what happens to the Bridges family, the servants, and the Marryots, during the years 1899-1933 in Great Britain.

Not in any way snobbish, the Marryots in fact have a very close relationship with their servants. But class is class, and the class system declines to the point where the daughter (Ursula Jeans) of Ellen and Alfred Bridges (O'Connor and Herbert Mundin) becomes involved with her childhood playmate, Joe Marryot (Frank Lawton), a sign that the world the Marryots knew is fading away.

All three Marryot men are involved in the Boer War, and two fight in World War I, to the distress of Jane Marryot (Wynyard), who is the representative of the antiwar sentiment.

There are other world events that touch the family as well: the death of Queen Victoria, and the sinking of the Titanic.

The film is a bit on the slow side and spends more time on the early period than the later. Coward, however, with shots of men blinded in the Great War, young men being shot, etc., makes his point very well.

My big quibble with this film is that it goes for 34 years. At the beginning, the Marryots have young children. Even if the Mr. And Mrs. Marryot were 30 years old at the beginning of the film -- why at the end of the movie did they look and act 90? It was hilarious as they're probably in their sixties. It goes to show how the concept of age has really changed.

This film is okay but somehow not as involving or as good as David Lean's This Happy Breed which concerns a middle-class family post World War I to World War II - also written by Noel Coward. I think This Happy Breed has a better cast; some of the acting in Cavalcade is a little stiff. Still, there are some striking scenes.

Unlike the big Oscar winners of later decades, the Best Pictures of the 1930s have largely been neglected (the only notable exceptions being It Happened One Night and Gone with the Wind). Of them all, Cavalcade is perhaps the most rarely remembered, and if remembered at all frequently dismissed as a dated, stagy melodrama, a product of an embarrassing era in cinema's history that even film buffs tend to shy away from, without even the added attraction of some pre-code naughtiness. But are bare legs, innuendo and mean-faced gangsters the only things worth salvaging from this era? The accusations of staginess are not surprising, Cavalcade being adapted from a Noel Coward play. But while Coward may have been a bit of a theatre snob with a naively upper-class attitude, he is not as impenetrably British as he may appear at first glance. Although Cavalcade focuses ostensibly on the concerns of a typical well-to-do English family, Coward strings together his story from universally emotional events, many of which would have related to the lives of people all over the world, and most of which still bear a kick today. Granted, Cavalcade's social conservatism and stiff-upper-lipped fustiness can be a little alienating, but this is not a preachy movie and nothing is forced home or laid on too thickly. Besides, Coward's warm humanism pervades even the most clichéd of characters.

The director is Frank Lloyd, himself an unfairly forgotten man of old Hollywood. Many will not understand why Lloyd one an Oscar for his work on Cavalcade, because he does not use any overt camera tricks, but the truth is Lloyd is too much of a master to need any tricks. Many of the claims of stiltedness probably stem from the fact that Lloyd uses a lot of long and often static takes, but there is still subtle and clever technique at work here. Take that first scene of Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook making their preparations for New Years Eve. A large chunk is done without a single edit, yet with a few simple panning manoeuvres Lloyd's camera is smoothly changing the focus and keeping things feeling fresh, at one point having Brook's face appear in the mirror, then following her over to the table where the two of them stand with a garland of flowers framing the lower edge of the shot. Another director might have used a dozen cuts in the same scene, but Lloyd does it with just one or two. And the great thing is you don't notice. Often he will shift our attention from one place to another, but do it by having the camera follow a walking character to disguise the movement, such as the father carrying off a crying child on the beach. In spite of this unostentatious approach, the style is purely cinematic.

To be fair however, most of the accusations of theatricality fall upon the cast. I would however describe the performances here as being stereotyped rather than grandiosely hammy. Diana Wynyard was the only Oscar nominee for acting, although she does little here but emote rather wetly. In her favour she does put a lot of expression into her small gestures, and as the picture progresses she ages her character convincingly. More realistic turns however are given by Clive Brook and Irene Browne. The real surprise performance of the lot though is Herbert Mundin. In his many supporting roles Mundin typically played a bumbling yet lovable comedy character, but here he is forceful, passionate and rather moving. Had such a thing existed in 1933, he could have been in line for a Best Supporting Actor award.

But, aside from all these qualities, why did Cavalcade of all things appeal to the Academy, which was not exactly cosmopolitan in those days? The answer may be that the mood of the picture was very apt for the times. This was of course the height of the depression, and despite appearances Cavalcade is a rather downbeat affair. The gung ho optimism of the Boer war is replaced by the bitter folly of the World War; characters disappear from the narrative, everyday life becomes increasingly impersonal, until the final scenes are almost despairing. And yet this is not some tale of personal tragedy. Crowds are a constant presence in Cavalcade, with Lloyd using them as a backdrop to a teary farewell, the bookends to a scene or even just a noise heard through a window. In Coward's play characters are killed off in significant events making them symbolic of the losses of a nation. This is a story of great suffering, but it is a story of collective suffering, and this makes it comparable to the most poignant and affecting pictures of depression-era Hollywood.

If you want to know what the twentieth century looked like to people in the early thirties, this is the film to watch. Two families - upstairs and downstairs - go through the events of the Boer War, the Edwardian age, the First World War and its aftermath, ending in the "chaos and confusion" of the depression. The film seems to be fairly closely based on the original Drury Lane theatre production (many of the cast are the same). So when Binnie Barnes delivers "Twentieth Century Blues" (excellently) this is presumably how Coward wanted it sung. Noel Coward's clipped dialogue can't always carry the weight of the themes, and the nobility of the upper-class couple gets a bit wearing, but there are fascinating glimpses of a music hall performance and an Edwardian seaside concert party. The film races through thirty eventful years, and one or two of the tragedies are predictable, but the period detail is terrific. The film is well worth catching.

The saga of two families from opposite ends of the social spectrum from New Year's Eve 1899 to New Year's Eve 1933. An ambitious drama from a play by Noel Coward which is as superficial as you'd expect from a movie which skips through four decades in under two hours. Diana Wynyard is truly excruciating as the matriarch of the upper class Marryot family, but Margaret Lindsay shines in a small role.