Cavalcade

[Reza]

And I swear that on the video tape I saw (borrowed from the New York Public Library) in the midst of this sequence there's a quick, almost subliminal, shot of a naked muscualr man with an erection. I even freeze-framed to make sure I wasn't imagining it, and sure enough, there he was.

Damien, surely you are kidding???

[Big Magilla]

I don't dislike the film, but I do think it's an artifact of its time that doesn't hold up the way other films of its era do.

[Reza]

I guess I'm the only person on this board to like this film.

[flipp525]

The acting wasn't really bad.

I guess her nomination can be explained away by a successful identification with the audience of the time but I found Wynard's "acting" just plain horrible. It's an awful performance, unbelievably bad by the fact that her character is completely one-dimensional and she plays it like she's posing for pictures in a child's flip-book. I'd say her Jane Marryot is one of the worst nominated performances in Best Actress history. It was only her second film so, I'm allowing for that.

Magilla, I do like the idea that O'Connor's performance made Lynn Redgrave in Gods and Monsters possible.

[Big Magilla]

I don't even see how Diana Wynyard could have been nominated. I thought she was terrible. She kept looking somewhat askew of the camera anytime she "got upset". There were no characters that you could give a damn about. Everything seemed like one unfortunate event after another. It was almost like a series of skits strung together in an incoherent narrative. I didn't like it that much. I gave it * 1/2. The acting wasn't good, the story wasn't good. The dialogue wasn't good. It was overall a poor excuse for a film. Thank god they made better choices the next few years.

The acting wasn't really bad. It was Diana Wynyard's quietly suffering mother that audiences of the day identified with, though both Greer Garson (Mrs. Miniver) and Irene Dunne (The White Cliffs of Dover) did the same thing to much better effect a decade later.

The really good performance, though, was Una O'Connor's as the maid who wins the lottery and puts on airs of superiority over her former mistress. A bit player in films prior to this, she used this performance as a springboard to a gallery of unforgettable characters over the next quarter century: the screaming innkeeper in The Invisible Man, the shuffling maid in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, the impoverished Mrs. Gummidge in David Copperfield, the screaming villager in The Bride of Frankenstein, the grieving mother in The Informer, Maid Marian's companion in The Adventures of Robin Hood, Charles Laughton's controlling mother in This Land Is Mine, the cook in Christmas in Conncecticut, the housekeeper in The Bells of St. Mary's Mary's, the throat clearing old biddy in Cluny Brown and the hard of hearing housekeeper in Witness for the Prosecution among many others. Both Maureen O'Hara in Only the Lonely and Lynn Redgrave in Gods and Monsters channeled her in recent years.

[Damien]

I actually kind of like Cavalcade, but then again I'm a sucker for those British Stiff-Upper-Lip sagas.

Wes, I remember the "Modern Decadence" montage in Cavalcade, but I'm not sure what you mean by "pair of men are sitting talking in what, to me, wasn't a terribly "friend"ly fashion." Are you saying a gay couple? Because I do think there was at least one in the sequence.

And I swear that on the video tape I saw (borrowed from the New York Public Library) in the midst of this sequence there's a quick, almost subliminal, shot of a naked muscualr man with an erection. I even freeze-framed to make sure I wasn't imagining it, and sure enough, there he was.

[OscarGuy]

I don't even see how Diana Wynyard could have been nominated. I thought she was terrible. She kept looking somewhat askew of the camera anytime she "got upset". There were no characters that you could give a damn about. Everything seemed like one unfortunate event after another. It was almost like a series of skits strung together in an incoherent narrative. I didn't like it that much. I gave it * 1/2. The acting wasn't good, the story wasn't good. The dialogue wasn't good. It was overall a poor excuse for a film. Thank god they made better choices the next few years.

[Big Magilla]

I don't recall that conversation. The film ends, as it begins, with a New Year's celebration.

I recently converted my old VHS copy to DVD and watched a lot, though not all, of it as it was recording.

The film was based on a major stage and radio sucess of the early 30s. The radio recording was (is?) available on vinyl and CD for some time. The production was a pretigious one for Fox at the time. The upstairs-downstairs bantering was novel, though since done to death in countless TV and film productions, the most famous being the long-running BBC series, Upstairs/Downstairs. What struck a chord at the time was Coward's thinly veiled prophetic moralizing that the world would soon face an even greater war.

All that considered, it made a rather predictable Oscar choice for best picture and director. Indeed, as late as a few years ago I considered it worthy of the bottom half of a 1933 ten-best listing, but no longer. It has aged badly.

The psuedo stiff-upper-lip British presentation doesn't help, nor does the divergent acting styles of Clive Brook and Herbert Mundin who should never have been allowed in teh same film, let alone the same room.

The men are all cardboard figures and the women, including best actress nominee Diana Wynyard don't have much to do other than suffer nobly, the great Una O'Connor being the sole exception.

It is entirely in keeping, as an Oscar winner of the early days, with such dubious choices as The Broadway Melody, Cimarron and The Great Ziegfeld. The latter won, in a deal between MGM's Lous B. Myer and Warners' Jack Warner, that if MGM AMPAS members would vote for Warners' Paul Muni for best actor, Warner would instruct his contractees to vote for MGM's film. Those other wins were at least based on some kind of conscious thought.

Broadway Melody won in the early Academy's race to honor the newly coined talkie phenomenon while giving the finger to such great late silents as The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Wind, The Docks of New York and The Wedding March. Cimarron won because they'd rather have given the award to a western soap opera than nominate, God forbid, a ganster film like Little Caesar or The Public Enemy, or Heaven save us, a mere silent like City Lights or gadzooks, a "foreign" film like The Blue Angel.

Cavalcade won because it was hoity-toity and Dinner at Eight, 42nd Street, King Kong, and Duck Soup and various other alternatives simply were not.



Edited By Big Magilla on 1160883429

[Penelope]

I really need to see Cavalcade again (or do I?); I didn't think much of it the first time. It's been two decades since I saw it and all I remember are soldiers marching off to the Boer War and the Titanic sequence. I do not recall the sequence you mention.

[OscarGuy]

How this won, I'll never know but can someone confirm something in this? During a sequence at the end where various people are lamenting moral decadence, does the camera not go to a small club where at the end of a tracking shot that then reversese course again a pair of men are sitting talking in what, to me, wasn't a terribly "friend"ly fashion?