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| End of an era: Jane Marryot (Diana Wynyard) and her family during Queen Victoria's funeral procession. |
Release Date: Apr. 15, 1933. Running Time: 112 minutes. Screenplay: Reginald Berkeley, Sonya Levien. Based on the play by: Noël Coward. Producer: Frank Lloyd, Winfield R. Sheehan. Director: Frank Lloyd.
THE PLOT:
New Year's Day, 1900: Jane Marryot (Diana Wynyard) and her husband Robert (Clive Brook) celebrate the dawning of a new century. Jane is already anxious about the future. Robert has enlisted to serve in the Boer War. He is so implacably English that even if he is afraid, he shows no sign of it - but Jane can't help but worry, not only for her sake but for the sake of their young sons, Edward and Joey.
Robert returns unharmed, but this is only the beginning of the family's adventures in the new century. With the death of Queen Victoria, there is a sense that the world is changing, perhaps too fast for the Marryots to keep pace. Over the decades to come, they will be tested by disasters, societal change, and another war that will prove far worse than the Boer conflict - and not all of the family will survive these events...
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| The Marryots and their servants, Alfred and Ellen Bridges, toast to a new century. |
CHARACTERS:
Jane Marryot: "History seen through the eyes of a wife and mother whose love tempers both fortune and disaster." So extolls the film's opening title card (showing the ongoing influence of silent filmmaking even by this point in time) - and it points to one of the chief problems: Diana Wynyard's Jane is often presented first and foremost as an Icon of Strength and Dignity; actually making her human is a secondary goal at best.
Wynyard is often as stiff and dramatic as that opening descriptor would indicate, but she manages to deliver some splendid nonverbal acting late in the film. After seeing her adult son Joey (Frank Lawton) to the train taking him to the first World War, she fumbles for a cigarette, her movements jerky and unsure. She sees injured soldiers being offloaded in stretchers, and stares, holding the flame of her match as it burns down in her hands. It's a terrific moment, all the more effective for the lack of dialogue or histrionics; I only wish the film offered more bits of its quality.
Robert Marryot: Clive Brook infuses warmth into Robert's interactions with his wife and children, and his performance is quite good overall... which makes it more of a pity that the film gives him so little. There is a good little scene after Robert returns from the Boer War, when he tells his son that he prefers not to talk about the war - a strong psychological note that is unfortunately never followed up, not even when another war entangles his family.
Alfred and Ellen Bridges: As a counterpoint to the Wynyards, we also (sort of) follow the working class Bridges family. When the film opens, Alfred (Herbert Mundin) is the Wynyards' butler, while his wife Ellen (Una O'Connor) is their maid. While in Africa, Alfred buys a pub, which he and his wife take over - only for Alfred to become a belligerent drunk, leaving Ellen to run the business. I suspect this entire thread is meant to show how much better everything was when "everyone knew his place," particularly given the final scene between Ellen and Jane. Even so, the flawed Bridges brood feels more relatable than the perfect Wynyards. When the movie all but stops following the poorer family midway through, it is much to the story's detriment.
The Children: Edward and Joey Marryot are most effectively used in the first third, when they are children. Here, we see their games and behavior used to emphasize some of the film's antiwar themes. They get into an argument with playmate Edith over their toy soldiers when the girl refuses to play as the enemy Boers. Jane exclaims: "Can't you play any other game but soldiers?". We also see the children watching the funeral procession for Queen Victoria with their mother; the older boy, Edward, is suitably solemn, while Joey can't quite keep still and clearly doesn't fully comprehend the occasion.
Unfortunately, as adults, Edward and Joey grow up to be interchangeable cogs, both fashionably cynical and fond of smug repartee (well, it is based on a Noël Coward play...). This extends to their relationships with their respective love interests, which are characterized more by witty banter than by any genuine sense of passion.
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| Playing at Soldiers: The young Edward and Joey Marryot. |
THOUGHTS:
Cavalcade billed itself as "the story of a generation," with a narrative taking viewers from the end of Queen Victoria's long reign to what was then the modern day; the movie ends on New Year's Day, 1933, the same year the film released. It's an ambitious project that was nearly universally praised on original release.
Roughly 90 years later, it is far less well-regarded, and I suspect for many of the very traits that made it popular at the time. In a time of sustained economic downturn, many contemporary viewers would have identified with the idea that better days were behind them.
From a modern standpoint, the ending is risible. The final scene sees Jane addressing the camera to appeal the audience that England will "one day find dignity, and greatness, and peace again." As they stand stock-still, facing the camera under old age makeup that makes them look like a pair of waxworks, I start giggling... But in 1933, I can readily imagine this same moment striking a genuine chord.
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| Off to War: One of the film's many impressive crowd scenes. |
FILM TECHNIQUE
From a technical standpoint, the movie holds up well. The scene in which Robert and Alfred ship out for the Boer War is striking. Two levels of a ship are filled with extras, with an enormous crowd seeing them off, in a moment of genuine spectacle that retains all of its original effectiveness. By contrast, Queen Victoria's funeral procession is made as small-scale and personal as possible. As Jane and her children watch from their upstairs balcony, we see the procession enter the street. Then we cut to the family, the rest of the scene playing out tightly on them, emphasizing Jane's sense that something fundamental is changing before her eyes.
World War I is represented through a montage. Soldiers march off toward a French town, singing songs from the era (It's a Long Way to Tipperary, then Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag). The montage continues, as the title changes to reflect each successive year of the war. By the time we reach 1917, the songs have faded and are replaced by an intense orchestral score, as the screen becomes ever more dominated by images of soldiers falling in battle.
Another montage takes us from the war's end to the 1933-set epilogue. We start with blind veterans working in a factory, then dissolve to a cemetery. This is followed by snippets of speeches: Talk about disarmament, then about defense. A Communist speaker complain that the entire world is broke. We move from him to a man denouncing religion into a radio mic, then to a sermon in a largely deserted church. This devolves into grim headlines about "vice" and "danger of war." The sequence ends with a hilariously stodgy shot showing "debauched nightflife" in all its horror: People dancing freely; a young woman holding another woman's hand; a man smiling as he puts a wristwatch on another man. All punctuated by Fanny Brewster (Alfred and Ellen's daughter) singing Coward's Twentieth Century Blues, summing up the themes of the movie:
"Why is it that civilized humanity
Can make the world so wrong?
...In this strange illusion,
Chaos and confusion,
People seem to lose their way."
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| Fanny Bridges (Ursula Jeans) sings the moral of the story with Twentieth Century Blues. |
THE FAILURES
Unfortunately, while Cavalcade has aged well in technical terms, much of the story falls flat. Not because of its ideas. The sense that times are changing, not always for the better, and that something is lost in the process? That's universal, and can be applied to almost any age. It's stronger if you are aware of the historical context - by the early 1930s, the British Empire was already well on its way to crumbling - but knowledge of that is not required.
Divorced from that context, however, the storytelling flaws that were always present become much easier to see. The first half mostly works well. The Boer War is well-realized, the entirely of the conflict seen through Jane's eyes as she waits at home. We follow her as she worries for her husband and brother, while her children "play soldiers" and pro-war messages clash with casualty counts every time she goes out onto the street.
As the film advances, it becomes less effective. Jane and Robert all but vanish for the middle of the film, which is far more concerned with the love lives of their children. I expected that when the World War I sequence began, we would again follow Jane as she waited at home for news. Instead, the excellent war montage is bookended by fairly dull scenes of Joey visiting love interest Fanny Brewster. It's telling that the most effective moment in this stretch is Jane's nonverbal reaction to seeing Joey to the train that will return him to the war. It's as if the film is aware that it's at its strongest when it's from her point of view, even when the scenes refuse to cooperate by sticking with her point of view.
Finally, there's the sense that needed material is missing. A child dies, and instead of seeing Jane and Robert and others react to that loss, we cut forward entire years to the next incident. Fanny receives a lot of screen time during the World War I section of the movie, but is never revisited post-war, save to sing a song. Fanny's parents, major characters in the first half, vanish in the second half; Ellen receives only a single, awkward scene late in the movie, suddenly transformed into a grasping meddler, her previous characterization sacrificed on the altar of making a point about "people not knowing their place." Generally, by trying to cover too much history with too many characters, Cavalcade fails to address much of the history and fails to develop most of its characters.
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| Jane tells us the moral of the story, while Robert appears to transform into a human waxwork. |
OVERALL:
Cavalcade remains technically impressive, with striking individual moments. Even so, it struggles to be an effective drama. After a strong opening Act, the story becomes unfocused in the second half. Moments that the story seems to call out for are just plain missing from the narrative. Finally, the stiffly delivered ending monologue, spoken straight to camera, feels like something that might have inspired Ed Wood.
Interesting as a historical and cultural artifact, perhaps... But I can't recommend it as a movie.
Overall Rating: 4/10.
Outstanding Production - 1931/1932: Grand Hotel
Outstanding Production - 1934: It Happened One Night
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