Cavalcade

Released Apr 15, 1933

1h 49m

Drama

List

66%

Tomatometer

38 Reviews

27%

Audience Score

1,000+ Ratings

Upper-crust Londoners Robert and Jane Marryot (Clive Brook, Diana Wynyard) and their working-class counterparts, Alfred and Ellen Bridges, experience life's many triumphs and tragedies from the Boer War at the dawn of the 20th century up to 1930s. Queen Victoria's death and the sinking of the Titanic etch deep scars on both families, but the outbreak of World War I and its dramatic aftermath proves to be the greatest test of their courage and friendship.

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Critics Consensus

Though solidly acted and pleasant to look at, Cavalcade lacks cohesion, and sacrifices true emotion for mawkishness.

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Inquirer Staff

Philadelphia Inquirer

Quite as much as the cast, if not far more deserving of praise, is the superior direction of Frank Lloyd who has handled the unwieldy and sprawling material with disciplined intelligence and understanding art.

Nov 9, 2022

Full Review

Pauline Kael

New Yorker

The self-conscious good taste of it all creaks, but Noël Coward knows plenty of tricks, and the performers know how to get the most out of his lines.

Jul 28, 2022

Full Review

Bruce Blevin

The New Republic

The production is technically brilliant if not very imaginative, and I got, as I did from the presentation in London, the sense of time’s tragedy which Mr. Coward intended us to have.

Feb 18, 2022

Full Review

Christopher Lloyd

The Film Yap

One of the earliest Best Picture Oscar winners has all the hallmark limitations of its time, but is still a moving and effective look at one British family through years of war, strife and joy.

Rated: 4/5

Dec 11, 2023

Full Review

Mark Johnson

Awards Daily

It remains a tad fruitless and humdrum, and is heavy on the dramatization of the passing of time.

Jun 27, 2023

Full Review

Francisco J. Ariza

Cine-Mundial

The subject is high-minded... But its content is so well-spun, its performance so careful and its development so artistic that each scene, even isolated, is a small gem. [Full review in Spanish]

Jan 13, 2021

Full Review

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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 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 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 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 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

Full Review

kevin w

"Do you remember the good old days?" Another filmic Hallmark card, filled with old songs (Auld Lang Syne is played quite a lot) and dedicated, in this case, to the start of the 20th century and specifically England. While the ugly of war is the central focus of the work, the changing of class distinctions is nodded at as well - "in the old days the so-and-so's knew their place!" The whole is topped with a kind of "Make England Great Again!" bon mot, unaware that WW2 was right around the corner, as well as a new generation that would long for the "easy, better days that came before the war"...all over again.

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

03/30/23

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 out of 5 stars

01/28/23

Full Review

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Frank Lloyd

Director

Diana Wynyard

Jane Marryot

Clive Brook

Robert Marryot

Una O'Connor

Ellen Bridges

Herbert Mundin

Alfred Bridges

Beryl Mercer

Cook

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Synopsis

Upper-crust Londoners Robert and Jane Marryot (Clive Brook, Diana Wynyard) and their working-class counterparts, Alfred and Ellen Bridges, experience life's many triumphs and tragedies from the Boer War at the dawn of the 20th century up to 1930s. Queen Victoria's death and the sinking of the Titanic etch deep scars on both families, but the outbreak of World War I and its dramatic aftermath proves to be the greatest test of their courage and friendship.

Director: Frank Lloyd
Screenwriter: Reginald Berkeley, Sonya Levien
Distributor: Fox
Genre: Drama
Original Language: English
Release Date (Theaters): Apr 15, 1933, Original
Release Date (Streaming): Oct 22, 2013
Runtime: 1h 49m

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