This one of the rarest Best Picture Oscar winners to get hold of (in fact, I had to make do with a copy culled from Spanish TV with forced subtitles in that language!) is yet more evidence that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences was still finding its feet in those early years and pretty much clueless as to which movies would stand the test of time! It is hard to believe now that this film managed to triumph over 42ND STREET, I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG and THE SIGN OF THE CROSS
not to mention THE INVISIBLE MAN, KING KONG and QUEEN Christina, which were completely bypassed for Oscar consideration! For the record, according to the "Combustible Celluloid" website, CAVALCADE was named by Luis Bunuel as one of his favorite films and, while the Leonard Maltin Film Guide awards it full marks, Leslie Halliwell is more moderate in his appraisal with which I found myself agreeing in the long run, given its stodgy overall quality (the title, by the way, is a repeated visual motif referring to the inexorable passage of time). In fact, inspired by an elaborate staging of the Noel Coward play, this epic production is basically the granddaddy of all those films of much more recent vintage say, ZELIG (1983) and FORREST GUMP (1994) in which world events are seen through the eyes of one source in this case, instead of an innocent bystander, we have the members (both upper and working-class) of a British household. The historical events depicted, then, incorporate the Boer War, the funeral of Queen Victoria (marking the death of an era in itself), the sinking of the Titanic, World War I (via montages supervised by the renowned and multi-talented William Cameron Menzies), and the Jazz Age up until then-contemporary times (with, however, another all-encompassing war already looming). Incidentally, though made in Hollywood, most of the cast is authentically British which, however, means that the acting alternates between stiff-upper-lipped types and earthy caricatures (resulting in rampant melodrama, crude attempts at humor and the inevitable bland romantic interest)! Having said that, what the film has going for it is a strong prestige value that keeps the disparate parts hanging together and the interest going throughout; in short, while CAVALCADE still impresses somewhat, it has inevitably dated. Director Lloyd, too, has been pretty much forgotten over the years: though he won an Oscar for his work here, following a previous win in 1928/29 for the supposedly lost(!) THE DIVINE LADY, his most (perhaps sole) enduring effort is the original version of MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935) which was also named Best Picture but, though nominated once more, Lloyd failed to make it a hat-trick (which, ironically, Frank Capra managed in the space of just 5 years: there is a famous story about how the man presenting the Best Direction Oscar for 1933 announced the recipient by simply saying, "Come and get it Frank", so that Capra rose from his seat to pick up his award for LADY FOR A DAY when the winner was really Frank Lloyd for the film under review!).
Review of Cavalcade
