I’ll be honest, I chose this one at random, so what are the chances I’d be talking about the Titanic two months in a row. Of course where the Titanic was the major plot point of A Flight to Remember, here it’s seen but briefly as a darkly ironic twist, the macabre punctuation to a young and promising romance. It’s brought up suddenly, and is just so suddenly dropped with the inference that these two significant characters died in its sinking. It would certainly make for a curious entry in a study of cultural depictions of the Titanic disaster, a la Lindsay Ellis’ old “Loose Canon” series, but it’s otherwise a historical event largely irrelevant to the story of Cavalcade, the 1933 Frank Lloyd adaptation of Nöel Coward’s play. It’s a minor backdrop, an excuse to get rid of a couple characters (who just so happen to be talking about their bright future moments before the reveal), and another in a series of historical shout-outs made by this early twentieth century Forrest Gump.
This and a couple other notable historical episodes are humourous in how clumsily they’re referenced, but Cavalcade is a movie that utterly fascinates me. It chronicles the life of two British families, the wealthy Marryots and their working class servants the Bridges during the early decades of the twentieth century -beginning on New Years’ Eve 1899, and concluding on that same day in 1932. The passing of the years is illustrated by a medieval cavalcade marching over a title card, with the exception of the First World War years where they’re substituted for soldiers. I love stories like this that follow characters and relationships and their world over decades or across generations, so the premise of Cavalcade had me pretty intrigued from the start. And especially with the dual focus on families at opposite ends of the class divide, such a film is poised to comment insightfully on and explore the evolution or devolution of that social construct. At its’ best, Cavalcade does exactly that. At its’ worst, it begs you to question why such a strong idea isn’t following halfway interesting characters.
Now, that’s not entirely honest, and the key figures of the film are written such that perhaps they would resonate much better on stage -the story’s original home. There are a few standouts amid the dull pomposity of aristocratic etiquette, namely Una O’Connor’s housekeeper turned self-made businesswoman Ellen Bridges. For an actress with the look and voice of Granny from Looney Tunes and best known for typecast comic relief roles in The Adventures of Robin Hood, Bride of Frankenstein, and David Copperfield (as Mrs. Gummidge), she delivers a surprisingly heartfelt and invested performance here as a character with a far more engaging story than those afforded greater screentime. In the corners of the movie, we see Ellen is a woman very much in love with her husband and Marryot family butler Alfred (a lively turned frighteningly burlish Herbert Mundin), anxious at the start about him going off to fight in the Second Boer War. We see her sorrowfully endure the managerial recklessness and drunkenness of Alfred in the years after he bought a pub, trying to keep their young daughter removed from his behaviour. And finally we see her liberated by his death (in another darkly comic fate, being run over by a fire engine carriage), now successfully running the pub herself and having made a comfortable fortune off it. The satisfaction of this empowering journey is muted somewhat by how we don’t actually see a lot of it, Ellens’ strongest moments happening off camera sometime in 1908. But O’Connor, reprising her role from the original theatrical run, makes up for a lot of that with a genuine emotionality and a charming attitude; one of those rare character roles in early Hollywood that truly allowed a woman to show off her range –which O’Connor does wonderfully.
The only other actress to make much of an impression is Ursula Jeans as Ellens’ grown-up daughter Fanny, suggesting even more strongly the better version of this story would focus on the Bridges family. Instead, the bulk of Cavalcade’s plot is centred on the experiences of the Marryots, which include such things as the patriarch being knighted, a luxurious holiday by the seaside, and one son surviving four years of the harshest war of modern history with most of his stiff upper lip and sunny posh disposition still intact. That son is played by Frank Lawton who would go on to similarly leave no impression on David Copperfield in George Cukor’s adaptation. The parents are played by Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook to very much a similar if not quite so obnoxiously cheery a degree. Wynayrd does alright for herself early on, but struggles in the unconvincing old age make-up in the latter portions of the film, stretching her performance to comic excesses as though in an effort to match it. Though in their defence, despite the significance of their characters as stand-ins for the state of Britain, they’re kind of these empty vessels. And the preponderance of reminders of their elite character can’t help but alienate them from most audiences. Coward often wrote about the upper-classes, but at least in something like Brief Encounter it wasn’t central to either character -despite their relative affluence, the problems of both felt like they mattered. Not so with Cavalcade.
And yet you do feel the weight of the changing world by how the film is structured through its series of vignettes across the decades. Of course in truth it only covers two -the death of the younger son mere days before the end of the First World War (because Coward seemingly can’t resist these fatalistic ironies) being the emotional climax by cutting short his romance with Fanny; and the 1920s is wholly glossed over so the film can end in the present day with the elder parents having outlived their sons. Still, the film is curious for some of its creative and technical choices in service of this scope. The literal medieval cavalcade thematically connecting these people and their world to history is one such example, but the film also experiments with montage, most notably in covering the First World War, in which subjective scenes of battle and death are superimposed over an army marching onto the front (scored perhaps unwisely to “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, undercutting some of the devastating imagery -if that’s not the films’ actual intent). The film also does a good job emphasizing just how big a difference twenty years makes -I mean the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 already signals the beginning of a new era. Cavalcade draws attention to these transitory moments of history subtly, so that one of Cowards’ greatest themes on how many world-changing events took place within a relatively short span of time comes across exceptionally. The jazz age it ends in seems so far removed from the J.M. Barrie, post-Dickensian environment of the beginning.
Coward certainly has some thoughts on that, and if Cavalcade is interesting in any way beyond its concept, it’s in what it says about Britain in the early twentieth century. The Marryots were optimistic and relatively contented going into 1900, as were the Bridges, servants though they were. And while the country was at war, with both husbands going to fight in it, it was a pre-Industrial War that Britain stood a good chance of winning. It was still the colonial era, so the British didn’t have a lot to worry about. Gradually though, circumstances change, the Marryots continue to aspire to live in the nineteenth century despite all their hope for the twentieth, and then they lose both their sons in completely unrelated tragedies just before those sons can start families of their own. It’s no accident on Cowards’ part that they each die not long after proposing to love interests they’ve had since childhood. These individual deaths reflect the severe impact both the sinking of the Titanic and the First World War had on Britain, and Coward is commenting on that lasting change they effected. The end of the war is followed by a highlights reel of the aftermath and the following fifteen years, including a shot of a war cemetery, advocates for peace, civil disruption over economic depression, an atheist psychologist, a priest before an empty church, and a series of extremely blunt headlines on corruption, violence, suicide, and sex (oh dear!) implying a kind of social and cultural decay. And indeed when toasting on New Years 1933 as Fanny sings glumly of “Twentieth Century Blues”, the Marryots (explicitly addressing the audience) show special reverence for the past, ending their toast with “let us drink to the hope that one day this country of ours which we love so much will find dignity and greatness and peace again”.
It’s exactly the kind of nauseating sentiment you’d hear from any Conservative in modern Britain, or in right-wing movements across the world. Cavalcade is a film ultimately operating under the thesis that Britain fell from grace and greatness in the early years of the twentieth century, one that takes the opinion that the Britain of expansionism, colonialism, and the rigid class system was the perfect entity of its world identity. But that argument doesn’t hold water, and not merely in the fact that such values are flagrantly outdated and absurd; the text doesn’t support it. Nothing seen in the movie indicates a great cultural declination -the incidents that befall both families are due to personal choices or bad luck more than anything, and most of the supposed national and “moral transgressions” alluded to in the final scenes flourished during the 1920s, which the film glossed over. At the end, it’s little more than two rich people complaining that things aren’t like they used to be, that the future they were promised wasn’t the one they received -and it leaves a bad taste.
However I keep thinking back to Ellen and Fanny, who both came out of three decades pretty successful (minus Fanny’s dead fiancé of course). The former owns a business, the latter is a singer. Perhaps theirs really is the story of Cavalcade. Perhaps it’s a shrewd satire, showcasing the point of view of rich people who see the evolving world as chaotic while ignorant or unable to empathize with its more positive impact on the poor. Perhaps its’ patriotism really is meant to be a jingoistic cartoon. Perhaps its’ greatest secret is that people like the Marryots deserve to have their delusions shattered.
Of course that’s just a more palatable reading. In any case, Cavalcade went on to win the sixth Best Picture Oscar in 1934, despite competing against more memorable fare like 42nd Street, A Farewell to Arms, She Done Him Wrong, The Private Life of Henry VIII, and Little Women (some things never change). Perhaps the most notable bit of trivia related to this film and the Oscars is the mix-up that occurred when Best Director presenter Will Rogers announced “Frank” as the winner only for fellow nominee Frank Capra to really get his hopes up before having them dashed halfway to the stage. Cavalcade has rested largely in obscurity since then, though I do think it deserves a little more scrutiny. If not a good movie, it is a weirdly beguiling one, and Una O’Connor’s performance certainly deserves to be seen.
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