The World Moves On

In the tradition of Fox Studios' Oscar-winning Cavalcade, The World Moves On covers over one hundred years in the lives of two Louisiana families: The Girards, of French extraction, and the Warburtons, formerly of Manchester. Forming an alliance by marriage in 1825, the families rapidly corner the cotton business in the South. Years later, three of Girard/Warburton sons split up to head business operations in England, France and Germany: as a result, descendants of the original families find themselves fighting on opposite sides during WW I (this episode is similar to a memorable sequence in the 1928 silent Four Sons, which like World Moves On was directed by John Ford). Surviving the war, Richard (Franchot Tone), the last of the descendants becomes a sharkish Wall Street speculator in the 1920s, ultimately losing his fortune in the Wall Street Crash. Bloody but unbowed, Richard and his wife Mary (Madeleine Carroll) cut their losses and return to their ancestral home, to start all over again. Both The World Moves On and the subsequent Fox production Road to Glory rely to a considerable extent upon stock footage from the grim 1931 French antiwar drama Wooden Crosses.

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.

There is one bit of dialog that I feel needs to be revisited. The husband says "Are you ready dear?" to his wife before she drops him off at a train station. Her response: "Of course dear, I've been ready for over an hour." This, which is a statement that has never been uttered again by a wife whilst getting ready to be somewhere, and the character Dixie played by Stepin Fetchit (it's surprising how offensive his character plays almost 80 years after this movie was made), are the only two memorable parts in this multi-generational tale directed by John Ford. I don't mean to trivialize this great artists' work, as he earned every accolade ever thrown his way, but this is a hiccup in a nearly flawless career. There are lessons to be learned here about avarice and lust for power, but they're sort of brushed over, because, as it turns out it's difficult to tell a story that spans 100 years in under 2 hours. Just remember to put those who love you and have stuck by you first and you don't need to spend the time seeing this. Rating 16/40

Most notable for being the very first movie passed by the Hays Office at the birth of the Motion Picture Production Code, receiving Certificate #1 from the board, John Ford's The World Moves On is worthwhile for more than just that historical footnote. A family saga akin to Anthony Mann's The Furies, it tells the story of a large cotton conglomeration with presence in the US, England, France, and Germany begun in the 1820s as it enters the 1910s and The Great War rears its ugly head. Loyalties get crisscrossed as the backdrop to a love story between two people, and then the movie doesn't find its narrative resolution for another decade. Contemporary reviews complained of the film, calling it way too long (a curious charge with a film that's about 100 minutes long), but I disagree. It's about half an hour too short.

The film begins in 1825 at the reading of the will of the Girard patriarch, cotton baron. His will sets forth the demands that his heirs split the company into four, one for each country, and run it in a way that puts the family and its needs first. In all of this is Richard Girard (Franchot Tone), set to take the reins of the American operation based in Louisiana. He sees the wife of a cousin, the beautiful Mrs. Warburton (Madeleine Carroll). They have a spark, but they are soon to be separated by thousands of miles and the Atlantic Ocean when her husband takes control of the English operations.

One of the more interesting things about the film is that Tone and Carroll play not only these 1824 characters but also their progeny in 1914. Richard's great grandson, also named Richard, is prepared to welcome the different branches of the family back in America for a celebration at the nearly 100 years of great work they have all done, and invited is Mary Warburton, great granddaughter of Mrs. Warburton. She is engaged to the German cousin Erik von Gerhardt (Reginald Denny), but when Mary and Richard meet, it's like the spark that their ancestors had shared carried over the years and they instantly feel a connection. There's falling in love at first sight in movies, and then there's providing interesting subtext and even a sense of magic to the idea.

The family is coming together to celebrate 90 years of success, and also to talk about the impending sense of war that is gripping the world. It's obvious that they'll need to strengthen their ties and gird for the upcoming disruption, and then they split to do their parts in the different parts of the world.

When war breaks out, Richard is in France, and he joins up with the French army to fight. Like Hawks' The Road to Glory and Ford's own Pilgrimage, most of the footage of battle is taken from the French film Wooden Crosses, and like Pilgrimage, the battle material is never the point. It's a small sliver of the larger story that Ford is trying to tell, and that story is the fraying of the family in the face of a world war. When Richard goes to England on leave, he meets up with Mary and quickly marries her, effectively ending her engagement to Erik. The family is unable to move goods from one branch to another because of the dangers at sea as well as the embargoes countries are putting up.

The war ends, and it feels like the story is going to come to an end as well. This is where the complaints that the movie is too long come from. With about twenty minutes left, we get the Roaring 20s where Richard becomes a megalomaniacal power mad businessman, making Mary feel abandoned in the process, and then the Stock Market Crash that brings everything down all of a sudden. The two have to move back to Louisiana from New York to rebuild. Thinking of the saga part of family saga, I really wanted this part to be at least an hour long, detailing Richard's change into a giant butt obsessed with money over family in the easy money times of the 20s after the hardships of the 10s. Instead, we get a contracted bit that feels like an extended coda that just happens to have some of the most important story bits in it.

Overall, the film is pretty good. A condensed saga that really could have either used more time to tell its full story or an earlier end point at the conclusion of the part of the film about the war. It's solidly made (even though Ford seemingly wanted nothing to do with the film during production) and acted. It could have been much more than it ended up being, but what it is ends up good enough to entertain.

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.