Review: "Cavalcade:" Why You Should Never Judge A Movie By Its Title

In 1933's horribly dated Oscar darling, we reflect on how far we've come in the cinematic process.

April 14, 2023

In 8th grade English, I sat in front of two popular boys. Neither was cute, interesting, or worth torpedoing my academic career, but I was severely uncool. As such, I took their fleeting kindness as an invitation to seize a moment of social acceptance and sink my grade like Titanic.

‍

One day, our teacher passed out our late-term grade reports. I was aware of my laissez-faire approach to passing middle school English, so I expected something well below my standards, but I couldn’t have fathomed the little number in the top right-hand corner: 27%, with three weeks left in the year.

‍

I couldn’t accept this. Failure? In English? I’m a writer! How could this be?

‍

“No more,” I said. I vowed to raise my grade like Genghis Khan to a village of screaming Mongolians... and that I did (sorry, Mongolia... and the rest of Asia).

‍

I completed every project, wrote every paper, and turned in every homework assignment. Slowly, my grade began to rise. 42%, then 56, then 77, then 90.

‍

Then, a test. A test I had prepared for so well that I was guaranteed an A.

‍

98%. My A was secure, or so I thought.

‍

The rest of the class, seemingly indifferent to the impact the test would have on me, refused to prepare and ensure a passing grade. In the spirit of the American public school system, the teacher normalized inadequacy and placed an exaggerated grading curve to bump everyone up. The problem was that those who weren’t utterly useless got bumped down.

‍

My A was gone. Final grade: 89.7. No rounding 'round those parts.

‍

Never again have I believed in curves. Unfortunately for Cavalcade, to consider it even mediocre, you’d have to grade it on a Steve Carlton curve so filthy it’d make a toilet clogged with the pungent remnants of a Mexicali chilibarb look like a Mr. Clean commercial.

‍

‍

We follow the Marryot couple, Lady Jane and Lord Robert, whose upper-class English lives turn tragic when the country is plunged into the Second Boer War, forcing Robert into the armed services to defend South Africa from the natives fighting for their own land. There’s sobbing and kicking and whining galore but little context. There’s no elaboration on the war, its causes, why serving is so important, or what effect the conflict will have on them and those around them. Nothing. It makes the entire film an exercise in irony: a movie named for a procession, a barrage, a harrowing eternity of happening should have such little happen when so much “goes on.”

‍

The younger Marryot son, Edward, takes to a childhood friend as a young man and marries her, something done with zero explanation of his character, hers, or the relationship itself, which is stitched from cheap fabric and ripped apart with ease. To be true: the marriage is ill-fated as the lovers board a luxury liner. If the gloriously un-subtle laments of “What if we were to die tonight?” and “Oh, look, the early 20th-century North Atlantic is soooooo calm!” don’t clue you in, the dramatic shot of a life preserver reading “RMS Titanic” will do the trick. The sinking and reactions of the family we’re meant to care for go unshown.

‍

History is simply a backdrop because Cavalcade foolishly presumes that history alone can entice and that rich, white people are the best way to experience what literally everyone else in the world also experiences. Queen Victoria dies, so says a passed-around newspaper at morning tea and the resulting funeral procession in which the inexplicably-knighted Lord Robert partakes.

‍

World War I breaks out two years after Edward’s death, a point of mere train car interest, where the family seeks to pass the time from one place to the next by learning of world events. Robert and the remaining son, Joseph, serve as officers, but to little fanfare. Their experiences in conflict are non-existent, the war itself a mere afterthought. It simply exists, as do the paper-thin characters existing within it.

‍

One cannot watch Cavalcade without thinking of Gone with the Wind, which covers 12 years in four hours. Its aspirations are lofty but manageable. It’s rich in story, vast in scope, and layered with character growth. It bites off all it can chew. Of itself, it expects all it can and no more.

‍

Cavalcade, on the other hand, tries to handle 34 years in less than two hours. As such, we get subjected to a ceaseless cascade of meaningless events intended to have value simply because they occur. Alfred, the Marryot’s servant, takes a chunk of change gifted by Robert and opens a pub with his wife and Marryott maid, Eileen. Fast forwarding eight years in an instant, Alfred has turned drunk. That’s all. He’s drunk. Why we do not know, and with what severity and damage we are equally ignorant.

‍

The same goes for the half-hearted examination of classism within the relationship between Joe and childhood friend Fanny, Alfred and Eileen’s daughter. The two reunite under unnerving circumstances, with the Marryot heir stalking her, hiding in her dressing room, and routinely refusing her rejections until she remembers him and immediately spreads her legs.

‍

Years later, with Joe fighting in WWI, Eileen pays her former employer a visit, where a quick-fire chat illustrates Lady Jane’s resistance to having the poor marry into her wealthy family. No matter, just as the proceedings heat up, a maid comes in with a letter. Joe has died. Lady Jane faints, ending the scene.

‍

Cavalcade: a lazy film pieced together like a battlefield surgery. It’s old in ways most movies from its time are. The dialogue always tells and never shows, no more evident than when Lady Jane literally says, “How wonderful our marriage has been.”

‍

The acting is so theatrical it’s neither deliciously camp nor dramatically convincing. Women flop in exhaustive hysteria at the drop of a hat and gaze into the distance with such histrionic forlorn one wonders if they’ve ever felt emotion.

‍

There’s no feel for time or pacing. We get subjected to watching our protagonists take in a play, shot from one angle and for what feels like an eternity. The emotion gets neglected entirely: for all their suffering, having lost two sons to unimaginable tragedy, Roger and Jane end the film with their signature New Year’s toast, where their summation of the previous 34 years is essentially, “Well, that was sad, but whatever.”

‍

Perhaps it’s unfair. Film was relatively new, an untapped art whose full potential was undiscovered. We’re always building and unearthing and improving and discovering. Should it not be that all that came before gets respected for where it led? After all, I exacted revenge on my English teacher, forcing him to read a ludicrous, 36-page story of teenage love, hanging corpses, and unnecessary trips to Morocco set against the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Can I, in the spirit of that vengeance, just move on?

‍

No. I don’t believe in curves, and I never will.