Il mondo va avanti

This 1934 movie is largely unknown and considering it was directed by John Ford this may seem surprising .Yet even quite exhaustive surveys of his work either omit references to this movie entirely or else give it only a passing mention.Now that I have seen it I feel that this is not really surprising after all .It is bombastic ,muddled and confused ,with a -for me -unacceptable pacifistic line .It is the product of an isolationist mind set and I found it morally repugnant .Thankfully ,it is not very good and so it is possible to dislike it on artistic grounds as well.

In form it is a family or dynastic saga ,split into a number of eras .It opens in 1825 in New Orleans as the family of a dead fabrics baron assemble for the reading of his will .The estate is split between branches of the family in the US -as represented by Franchot Tone -,England ,France and Germany .The rest of the action is this segment consists of Tone killing a ,man in a duel for insulting Madelaine Carroll.She and Tone have a mutual attraction but she is engaged to someone else and the affair is not consummated .

The movie then moves forward to Europe immediately before World War 1 .The family gathers for a dynastic wedding .Tone and Carroll re-appear ,both playing descendants of the people they portrayed in the opening section of the movie.There are hints -conveyed by their response to a particular piece of music -that they have some kind of "deja vu" connected with their ancestors previous relationship but this potentially intriguing theme is never pursued .War breaks out and the family splits on national grounds .Tone joins the French Foreign Legion to take up arms against Germany but others respond in less sensible ways.Carroll defies the orders of the government and refuses to make munitions (an act of treason which bizarrely Ford seems to agree with)while a key member of the French side of the family joins the priesthood as a gesture against the war .

The last part of the movie takes place in the 1920's .Tone is now a tycoon and an absolute megalomaniac driven by greed and a lust for power.The crash of 1929 sees him reappraise his life and values and take a "peace ,love and understanding ,man" approach to life .

There are some good things about the picture .The scenes of wartime action ,without recourse to graphic violence ,do depict the horrors of war well but overall this is a sprawling mess of a movie .The episodic structure and the obvious striving after "significance "allied to a propensity to preach at the audience make it tedious .The last 10 minutes is essentially a lightly dramatised and sententious pacifist tract and as wishy washy as such farragoes of nonsense invariably are .One section is particularly offensive ,It involves newsreel footage of Hitler ,Mussolini and Japanese militarists and the British navy .

Aside from a couple of shots, it would be almost impossible to tell that John Ford directed this if you didn't see the credits. There is an astonishingly good combat sequence, but apparently most of this footage comes from a French film that Fox bought a few years before Ford made World in '34. Nonetheless, the combat stuff is breath-taking, and very well integrated with studio footage of the principals. Stepin Fetchit has some good lines. Some nice compositions show that Ford (or his cinematographer) wasn't totally disengaged. The multi-generational love story with its mystical overtones seems totally out of character for Ford, but the opening and closing shots of Christ on the cross remind us of Ford's lifelong religiosity.

Besides being directed by one of Hollywood's all-time great directors, June 1934's "The World Moves On" was noted for one monumental change in cinema that impacted movies for the next thirty years. The John Ford-directed film was the first Hollywood movie to receive the binding stamp of approval from the newly-established Production Code Administration (PCA) under its newly-appointed director, Joseph Breen. Front-ending the movie is a statement from the PCA that it and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America approved the picture, stamping it Certificate No. 1.

The Pre-Code era was over. From 1929 through the middle of 1934, the MPDDA, under the rather lax supervision of William Hays, was an organization set up by Hollywood studios to fend off federal, state and local attempts to censor their movies. State and local bureaus continued to exert some minor tweaking in their censoring. But it was up to the small, overworked staff at the Hays Office to largely suggest to the studios to adhere to a code that was wide in its scope but was flouted by the industry. The Office's rulings weren't binding, proving it wasn't able to prevent the release of questionable movies for the nation's studio-affiliated theater chains. As one trade publication reported, "the Hays moral code is not even a joke any more; it's just a memory."

The Catholic Legion of Decency and other religious organizations were upset with the slack enforcement of the Production Code and threatened to boycott movie theaters until Hollywood cleaned up its act. The studios became nervous facing the possibility of seeing their industry shrink. They collectively agreed to have staunch Catholic and supervisor for the MPDDA public relations department, Joseph Breen, be appointed as the president of the newly-established PCA. Breen came in with an iron clad series of strict enforcement policies that prohibited any movie from being shown in the nation's major theaters without the PCA stamp of approval. Hollywood readily accepted the new rules.

Breen's power in Hollywood lasted until the mid-1950s. Liberty Magazine described his tremendous scope as having, "More influence in standardizing world thinking than Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin." His strength lay in a 1915 Supreme Court decision ruling movies did not enjoy any First Amendment rights, which restricted cinema's freedom of expression. Forty years later the Supreme Court reversed its 1915 ruling and gave cinema certain rights of free expression and speech. But it took several years more years as Hollywood tinkered around the edges before the mid-1960s, when the studios finally were given the freedom that even pre-code producers would envy.

"The World Moves On" didn't cause Breen and his newly-appointed lieutenants any problems. Wilfred Sheehan, Fox Films chief of productions, took special interest in this movie. He insisted the Reginald Berkeley script, similar to the Academy Awards' 1933 Best Picture "Cavalcade," be filmed to a "t." Director Ford hated the screenplay, and felt it needed tightening. In a later interview, Ford described how Sheehan was adamant on the importance of each scene, and the producer told the director in no uncertain terms to film exactly the way it was scripted. The director did, noting in later interviews the picture was "a bunch of crap."

"The World Moves On" begins in the early 1800s, examining two cotton trading families in America and in England. The picture then jumps to World War One and contains outstanding war sequences, some of the footage gleaned from a war documentary. Film critics at the time, such as The New York Times, noted it was "an ambitious undertaking, well composed and photographed, but it does seem as though the film would be all the better if it were shortened," while the Chicago Tribune wrote it had one fault: its "extreme length." Ford's instincts proved correct. No producer since has dared to demand as Sheehan had that the director follow a script to a 't.' Ford soon left Fox Films and went to Columbia Pictures, leaving the only studio he had ever worked at for over 17 years.

Part of a seemingly endless stream of WWI films that attempted to process the trauma of that war or bemoan the fact that it happened and was the most barbaric one in recent memory. The World Moves On falls more comfortably into the former camp, although the way in which it conflates familial loyalty and national comity, particularly through the avenue of financial connectedness, comes off a little tone-deaf. And to be honest, the central drama of the family weathering the tides of time was rather tepid and uninvolving, for the most part. The film's strongest segment was the war itself, which captured its chaos and neverendingness in an extended montage. The film's ending attempts to reconcile the impending feeling of another war on the horizon with the hope that the "family" will continue on as before. But when that "family" is so tied up with Old World sentiments that, through blindness and idealism, led WWI to sneak up on them, it rings hollow. Those Old World certainties are dead, and the liberal myopia that led them into the conflict needs to die as well. As a film, I admire the craft that John Ford put on display, but it left a bit to be desired thematically.

For a John Ford film this one is usually not mentioned in any retrospectives I know concerning his career. For a film that is internationalistic in scope it gets sadly neglected.

Another reviewer compared The World Moves On to Cavalcade which came out a year earlier. For me this film most closely resembled The House Of Rothschild only instead of money the commodity is cotton and in the 19th century. In some places cotton was considered a kind of currency like in the American south. In 1825 the American family Girard merges with the British Warburtons and then has other sons settle in France and Germany just like Nathan Rothschild's kids as early proponents of globalism.

After an 1825 prologue the action skips to 1914 where Sig Ruman of the German branch is hosting a big blowout with nary a thought to a possible war breaking out. War and the Roaring 20s type materialistic peace that followed are what is dealt with.

By the way also watching this film I did wonder just how the combine managed to weather the American Civil War. But that was never mentioned.

The film focuses on Franchot Tone of the American branch and Madeleine Carroll of the English Warburtons. They marry and she jilts Reginald Denny of the German branch in the process. Then Tone almost on a lark enlists in the French Army. The family with losses both financial and personal carries on though.

Shoehorned into the film is Stepin Fetchit in a real travesty of a role. He's the family retainer as he usually is. Here he spots some French Senegalese African soldiers in dress uniforms and he thinks it's a lodge and wants to join. Of course he's eagerly recruited. Today's viewers might not realize but the popular Amos N' Andy radio show had their protagonists as members of the Mystic Knights Of The Sea Lodge. That reference to a lodge would not have been lost on a 1934 viewer. Stepin Fetchit's role adds zero to the story and it's more offensive than usual.

Best part of The World Moves On are the battle scenes in World War I. They are not glamorized in any way, hardly like one of Ford's cavalry epics.

I rate The World Moves On as low as I do because of Stepin Fetchit. Had he not been there this would far higher on John Ford's list of films for quality.