Cavalcade

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J. M. P Cavalcade (1933) has a nice premise for the story. I enjoy the overall idea behind the movie. However, the characters are hard to connect with. Multiple story arcs spring up and die off, and the only connection between them is their family ties. With little background for the characters, it becomes hard to appreciate them. Transitions are rough, and one must make assumptions about the character's background. Character development is hardly touched on, so the characters remain static throughout the movie. Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 02/08/25 Full Review Nathan T Cavalcade is a gorgeous and powerful movie which I really like. It is more powerful when understood within the context of the time, at the depths of the Great Contraction. The message of hope and perseverance is deeply powerful and moving. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 01/15/24 Full Review harwee h Up there amongst the worst best picture winners. But this movie gives you a glimpse of the academy and the public's cinematic taste at that time. Definitely a movie that is of its time, overly nationalistic in romanticizing the british empire, and from the lens of the upper class at that. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 12/25/23 Full Review Audience Member While a commercial success, it was sweeping, episodic and spanning over thirty years which was no doubt a challenge in the 1930s. It featured an all British cast and traced the lives of the British Upper Class Marryot from an 1899 NYE celebration through the sinking of the Titanic, WW 1, the 1920s, the Depression and up to a second NYE celebration in 1932. The effects of good and bat times and world events on the family's lives were chronicled (wartime, death of the Queen, husband's knighthood, loss of one son on the Titanic and another in WW 1) Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/08/23 Full Review jordan m It was tough sledding to get through this movie, and it's one of the few I've ever seen where I strongly considered just turning it off toward the end. The sound mixing/editing was absolutely horrendous, some of the worst I've ever experienced in that I had to nearly max out my speaker volume for the dialogue to be clear enough to understand but, far more than nearly any other movie I've watched, the filmmakers had this bizarre notion that what people really came to see was multiple sudden yet sustained bursts of raucous applause and literal whistles blowing at what had to be 4x the decibel level of the actors' voices. I have for other movies considered whether this was my own fault for not having bought an expensive surround sound system that purports to separate dialogue into its own channel and all that, but even if I were to do so for this movie it remains an incredibly poor effort at making an epic. There are at least half a dozen silent movies that did the plot of "existing through historical events" better than this (most notably 1914's Cabiria but even The Birth of a Nation was more exciting about it) and even opportunities to show off the acting talent they'd bothered hiring were passed on in an effort to provide more exposition scenes; they skipped right over her reaction to her son dying on the Titanic, which was the main reason I even watched this. I had an openly antagonistic relationship with this movie for the remaining 40-ish minutes after they blew a whistle so hard that my ears rang, and I took two days off of watching movies afterwards from the bad mood it put me in. Tremendously disappointing. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member Another dreadful early Oscar best picture winner. A weird montage of sentimentality and sombreness recounting the first thirty years of the twentieth century through British eyes. I particularly loved the long section where they covered the Spanish flu and the devastating impact it had on society.... oh. #lovehysteria #lovelockdown Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 01/28/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Cavalcade

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