Cavalcade (1933)

The stories of two families (an English lord and his family, and his servants and theirs,) presented in a series of vignettes illustrating the first three decades of the 20th century.

Starting with 1900’s New Year and the eve of the Second Boer War and its return; the death of Queen Victoria; the historic flight by Louis Blériot over the English Channel; an ill-fated trip (whose conclusion must inevitably be read as the punchline of a pitch black joke today but which, at the time, it might have been read differently); World War I; and ending in another New Year’s eve in 1932, the story includes family members called to join the military; children growing and a baby being born; leaving servitude and investing in a pub (with help from their previous employers); the grown up children falling in love, courting, and getting married; deaths, natural, accidental and war-based, etc.

Though the noble Marryots (Clive Brook, Diana Wynyard) call their servants, the Bridges (Herbert Mundin, Una O'Connor), ‘friends’ this, not only may not be the case, but there is obvious resentment between the social classes which eventually surfaces openly.

The film seems an odd way to start the Fox Studios 75-year retrospective, but there will be other even stranger choices, even just by the second film in the collection.

At the very least it is significant as an historical record, not that it is not effective on its own: Even just the very first sequence in which two fathers are drafted to serve in Africa shows the true-felt heartbreak of those who are left behind.

The titular cavalcade refers to the inexorable march of time, but also of those who travel along to an uncertain and maybe not-so-hopeful future (a late-in-the-film montage does it best to illustrate the madness of the 20th century, even this early in it), and is illustrated by the near-surreal, literal imagery of horses repeated in each of its chapters.

These sequences reminded me of Bunuel’s own endlessly marching bourgeoisie in Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) which in retrospect maybe isn’t as strange or as disconcerting as we might have thought, at least judging by film imagery used four decades earlier.

Could the curator have chosen a better film to open their retrospective?

I don’t rightly know, but it’s not really a bad choice since it did win Best Picture even when the Academy’s choices don’t quite always survive the test of time.

Notable Pre-Code element are limited to alcoholism and a starlet undressing in front of a hidden voyeur, (even when he is then shown to be embarrassed of his behavior.)

With Beryl Mercer, Irene Browne, Tempe Pigott, Merle Tottenham, Frank Lawton, Ursula Jeans, Margaret Lindsay and John Warburton.