6. 1932/33 - Cavalcade

Fact Sheet:

Oscars:

• Art Direction - William S. Darling
• Directing - Frank Lloyd
• Outstanding Production - Fox

Nominations:

• Actress - Diana Wynyard

Best Picture Contenders:

• A Farewell to Arms
• 42nd Street
• I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
• Lady for a Day
• Little Women
• The Private Life of Henry VIII
• She Done Him Wrong
• Smilin' Through
• State Fair

Runtime: 110 min.

The tagline of Cavalcade was "The Picture of the Generation". It tells the story of two generations of two families (an upper class family and their servants) from New Year's Eve 1899 through New Year's Day 1933, set against several historical events such as the Second Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of Titanic and - again - World War I.

A cavalcade is a parade of horses, usually of a military nature, and this movie is a cavalcade of history. It doesn't tell the story of those historical events, much in the same way that All Quiet on the Western Front wasn't a movie on World War I. Cavalcade tells the story of regular people of all classes and all ages living through that history. We all know about those events (except the Boer war, the fight of the British empire against the Dutch settlers in South Africa), but we know about them from a third person perspective. We can look back at them and study them, see the bigger lines, see their consequences. But there are people who have lived it, there are people who have seen their children go off to the war, seen their children die on Titanic, and lived through the entire cavalcade of history, and this movie tries to show us their lives.

The premise of Cavalcade is quite marvelous, and it's this combination of fiction with characters we can care for against an interesting historical backdrop that, like Cimarron two years earlier, makes this a very watchable movie. However, it also still shows signs of the introduction of sound into Hollywood. The camera is rigid and stuck with making "tableau" scenes: the same total shot of a room and all characters talking in it, sometimes for over a minute, very few closeups which lead to us rarely actually getting into the emotions of the characters, and necessitating a "larger" style of acting: the women faint just too regularly in this movie, where much more emotion at the death of a child can be transferred by a closeup of a face in tears.

It is also funny that some of the events in the movie have in turn been made into OBP-winning movies (obviously World War I, which here has featured in its third OBP-film already in the six years of Oscar history, and the sinking of Titanic, which would go on to win the 70th OBP). History seems to be doing quite well at the Academy Awards so far, and there is much, much more of it to come.