ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

GazerRise Fantastic!

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Delight Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

gavin6942 A cavalcade of English life from New Year's Eve 1899 until 1933 seen through the eyes of well-to-do Londoners Jane and Robert Marryot. Amongst events touching their family are the Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of the Titanic and the Great War.The film was one of the first to use the words "damn" and "hell", as in "Hell of a lot". These had been used in the play. There was concern at the Hays Office that this could set a precedent. Fox president Sidney Kent was quoted saying the mild profanity "could not offend any person; and, after all, that was the real purpose of the Code. And as far as the use creating a precedent which might be followed by other producers is concerned, the best answer would be that anyone who could make a picture as good as Cavalcade might be justified in following the precedent." Some of the early Best Picture winners are really duds in retrospect. Looking back now (2016) they are bland, or aged poorly, or are sometimes musicals that just no longer impress. "Cavalcade" is a rare exception in that it seems like it has not aged one bit. The years go by, and we watch the events fly by with the characters, and it is somewhat timeless. We see how the 1900s were viewed from the 1930s, and I wonder now how much films like this continued to affect our view. We no longer talk about the Boer War, but even re-assessing history it seems our focus has never changed.

The_Film_Cricket I guess you could write a case study on the way that a society deals with tragedy. Take, for example, the First World War. For years after the conflict - at least until the conflict that followed it – those left behind tried to deal with it any way they could. That's where the arts are so important, in a manner of dealing with tragedy in art or music or in film, it makes for a certain auditory and visual means of wrapping our minds and our emotions around the tragedy of the insatiable need for humans to kill one another in the name of honor.In the early years of the academy awards, several films dealt with the subject and walked away with the top prize. First was Wings, a largely pro-war epic that tried to help us understand the war in the air. Two years later came the devastation of Lewis Milestone's adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, a fearless anti-war epic about the men in the trenches displayed in bloody and unflinching detail. Those films dealt with the war from battlefield. Two years later came Cavalcade, a portrait of war and family on the home front.Of course, with Cavalcade, The First World War only makes up part of the story, but the impact is there. Based on a 1931 play by Noël Coward and directed by Frank Lloyd (who would go on to direct another Best Picture winner Mutiny on the Bounty before the decade was out), Cavalcade follows thirty years in the rise and fall of a wealthy British family from New Year's Eve of 1899 to New Year's Day of 1932. We see them through The Second Boar War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of The Titanic and finally The First World War. Like Cimarron, a western that won the Oscar for Best Picture two years earlier, Cavalcade deals with the progression of world affairs as seen through the eyes of a family over several decades. The difference is that this film deals with specific red-letter moments whereas the other film simply dealt with personal issues seen through the passage of time.The focus of Cavalcade is on two families, one rich, the other employed as their servants. The wealthy are the Marryots, headed by Sir Robert and wife Lady Jane (Clive Brook and Diana Wynyard. They have two sons, Edward (John Warburton and younger brother Joe (Frank Lawton). The Bridges are headed by Alfred (Herbert Mundin) and wife Ellen (the invaluable Una O'Connor). They have a daughter Fanny (Ursula Jeans).The film opens with Robert going off to fight the Boar War and ends with son Edward coming back from The Great War. That leaves the focus of the film mostly on the women, specifically on Lady Jane who stays home and fears that her husband and then son won't come back. It is a decent performance but not great. The film is very talky and most of that talk is very flat and stiff. Cavalcade leaves you feeling as if you're watching a stage play – which is the last thing you want from a feature film.Diana Wynyard, a darling of the British stage made only a few stopovers in film throughout her long career (this was her second film) but mostly spent her life in the theater. She gives a decent performance here as Lady Jane but it is clear that the theater is still in her blood. She's was not a natural film actor and it is evident in her performance. She got her only Oscar nomination here but lost to Katherine Hepburn, came back to film occasionally but stayed on the stage until her death in 1965.Her legacy would outlive this movie. It is an interesting curio in that it shows us the lives and attitudes of people just a generation into the 20th century, but there's not real tension here. The movie is dusty and flat. There's no passion, no energy. Everyone looks as if they are reading cue-cards. For that reason, Cavalcade is all but forgotten today, a curiosity but not a necessity. Of all the Best Picture winners is has more or less passed out of common knowledge. That's as it should be because, as well intentioned as it is in dealing with war, it is not worth remembering.

carleeee The film follows two London families from the end of 1899 through to 1933, throughout various real-life historical events: the Marryots, an upper-class family; and the Bridges, a family in service who work as the Marryots' live-in maid and butler with their infant daughter. As per the title card, the film is mainly based through the eyes of Mrs Jane Marryot (Diana Wynyard), "a wife and mother whose love tempers both fortune and disaster". I enjoyed the film, it could be the Forrest Gump of its day but more realistic since it covered fewer events and more central characters. Despite their losses, Mr and Mrs Marryot regret nothing come the end of the film and greet their golden years with a philosophical outlook.There is a good mix of drama, romance and a few laughs (Merle Tottenham's overly-nasal character asking "where is Afrey-kerr?" while talking about the Boer War). We are also treated to different perspectives of the events, comparing a young woman thinking how wonderful it is seeing all their men off to war with an older woman stating she was just wondering how many of them would come back alive; as well as comparing the servants downstairs and the family upstairs as Downton Abbey did in a more recent example. I liked how they used the montage effect similar to All Quiet on the Western Front during scenes from the War. Scenes showing emotion or grief tended to be over-done or skimmed over, perhaps to avoid dragging the mood.

Robert J. Maxwell This is one of those sweeping intergenerational stories of an upper-middle-class British families in which the children grow up over the course of thirty or so years, with the older and the younger generations each encountering triumph and tragedy. There's a bit of class conflict thrown in when the daughter of the kitchen maid becomes a successful and wealthy singer and the upper-echelon son of the ruling family fall in love with each other. There are some musical interludes, none of the songs written by the author of the play from which this film derives.That author was Noel Coward. Coward was great in some of his movie appearances, which ranged from the heroic ("In This We Serve") through the comic ("Our Man in Havana") to the somewhat bizarre and slightly menacing ("Bunny Lake Is Missing"). I quite like the guy.Yet this story seems pointless to me in many ways. A lot of these epic movies about subsequent generations and their adaptation to social change do. I know Noel Coward's work is esteemed, and I know we should all keep a stiff upper lip and hope for the best, but as one New Year celebration follows another, the message gets tiresome. Really, I was saddened by some of the turns taken by events, but didn't much give a damn what happened to any of the characters, all of whom struck me as animated messages rather than living people.What tragedy. Let me see. In the beginning there is the Boer War. The death of the Old Queen. Then two characters from the household discover they love one another -- on the Titanic. Then there is World War I. That's followed by the Jazz Age with all its threats, and what noisome threats to social stability they are -- drinking is flagrantly shown on the screen, along with homosexuality (that's a laugh, coming from Noel Coward), the threat of yet another war, art moderne, smoking cigarettes (well, we've gotten rid of that filthy nuisance), blues singers, and long fluffy feathers.At the end, the original father and the original mother, now old and a little bent, toast each other delicately. They turn and look solemnly into the camera and the mother pronounces a long toast to both the past and the future while the viewer pendiculates. Then, arm in arm, the stroll to the balcony and smile at the New Year celebration in the streets below.I suppose this sort of thing appeals to a good many people. There seems no avoiding these stories. If there IS a way of slipping past them, would someone let me know?