Cavalcade

It's sad that this Academy Award Best Picture winner is largely forgotten today. I found this multi generational story to be rewarding. It starts on New Years Eve 1899 and follows two families and their children, through the next three decades. It presented a tapestry of love and life, as the various couples in the film experience the events of the 20th century that unfold around them, forever changing them.

One path is taken by the well-to-do rich family who have two sons, and the other path is taken by their head butler and his wife who buy a small pub...they have a daughter. As the decades go by the men go off to war and societal values change. These changes effects the two couples based on how strong or weak their love is for each other.

As the children grow up and become adults their lives too are shaped by the events that take place in the first part of the 20th century. One son finds true love and spends the perfect night with his fiancee on-board a doomed ship, the Titanic. The other son finds love with the daughter of the former butler and maid. He's sent off to WWI like his father was sent off to the Boar Wars some years earlier.

I was struck by the serenity of acting by the cast and especially by Diana Wynyard who plays Lady Jane Marryo. She bears a striking resemblance to Norma Sheerer. There are no big names in this movie as it was made by one of the smaller studios Fox.


Cavalcade is an interesting study of cultural, time and people and how events shaped them.