Cavalcade **** (1933, Diana Wynyard, Clive Brook, Una O’Connor) – Classic Movie Review 2215

Director Frank Lloyd’s 1933 drama Cavalcade is a creaky but still entertaining and stirring nostalgic movie version of Noël Coward’s sentimental English patriotic pageant stage play. It was a three-Oscar winner, for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Art Direction (William S Darling). Diana Wynyard was Oscar nominated as Best Actress in a Leading Role.

Noël Coward, author of Cavalcade.

Aristocratic actors Clive Brook and Diana Wynyard provide just the right kind of suitably stiff-lipped that are needed as well-to-do Londoners Jane and Robert Marryot, the heads of an upper-crust English family who are seen at historically significant points of British national crisis. The movie unfolds at various times from 1899 to World War One, including the homecoming after the relief of Mafeking, the British army’s send-off to do battle in World War One, the shock of the Titanic disaster and the German air raids over London.

Coward’s 1931 stage triumph is still an impressive achievement in this antique American movie version, which tries to remain faithful to the original, with Fox Movietone newsreel cameramen even being sent to London to record the original stage production to provide a guide for the film-makers. After all these years, Cavalcade remains enjoyable, rewarding, revealing and oddly moving (strange how potent cheap music is!) thanks to all the ambition, energy, vitality enthusiasm and period charm of Coward’s material and the grand scale of the Fox studio’s production.

This huge scale, good-looking, costly ($1,180,280) American movie was highly popular in the US as the second most successful film of 1933, making it less surprising that it won those Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Art Direction (William S Darling). It became the third war-themed film in six years to win the Best Picture Academy Award, after Wings (1927) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). After Wynyard was Oscar nominated as Best Actress in a Leading Role, she got her footprints cemented outside LA’s Gramuan’s Theatre too.

After playing a two-a-day reserved seat engagement at Broadway’s Gaiety Theatre in January 1933, Cavalcade opened at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, becoming the first film there to be held over for a second week. It went on general theatrical release on April 15.

Coward was paid $100,000 for the rights to the play and his songs. Typically, he is uncredited on the film. The play opened in London on 6 September 1931 and had 405 performances. Una O’Connor, Irene Browne and Merle Tottenham re-create their stage roles for the movie. The play is not revived due to the huge scale of the production. Coward praised Wynyard’s performance as ‘sincere and beautiful, as I had hoped to see in the picturisation of my play’.

The Titanic’s port of registry was actually Liverpool, and not Southampton as in the film. Betty Grable plays girl on couch uncredited and the servant’s little daughter is Bonita Granville. The film’s Best Picture Oscar statuette sold for $332,165 at auction on 28 February 2012.

Just for the record, a cavalcade is a parade or a procession, or any noteworthy series of events or activities. But it started off as a procession of people riding on horses, in horse-drawn carriages or cars, and comes from early Italian cavalcata, a horseback ride, from cavalcare to ride on horseback.

It is ironic, though typical, that this very British piece is available only on a Region 1 US Import Blu-ray.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2215

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