Lack of good storyline.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I guess you could write a case study on the way that a society deals with tragedy. Take, for example, the First World War. For years after the conflict - at least until the conflict that followed it – those left behind tried to deal with it any way they could. That's where the arts are so important, in a manner of dealing with tragedy in art or music or in film, it makes for a certain auditory and visual means of wrapping our minds and our emotions around the tragedy of the insatiable need for humans to kill one another in the name of honor.In the early years of the academy awards, several films dealt with the subject and walked away with the top prize. First was Wings, a largely pro-war epic that tried to help us understand the war in the air. Two years later came the devastation of Lewis Milestone's adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, a fearless anti-war epic about the men in the trenches displayed in bloody and unflinching detail. Those films dealt with the war from battlefield. Two years later came Cavalcade, a portrait of war and family on the home front.Of course, with Cavalcade, The First World War only makes up part of the story, but the impact is there. Based on a 1931 play by Noël Coward and directed by Frank Lloyd (who would go on to direct another Best Picture winner Mutiny on the Bounty before the decade was out), Cavalcade follows thirty years in the rise and fall of a wealthy British family from New Year's Eve of 1899 to New Year's Day of 1932. We see them through The Second Boar War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of The Titanic and finally The First World War. Like Cimarron, a western that won the Oscar for Best Picture two years earlier, Cavalcade deals with the progression of world affairs as seen through the eyes of a family over several decades. The difference is that this film deals with specific red-letter moments whereas the other film simply dealt with personal issues seen through the passage of time.The focus of Cavalcade is on two families, one rich, the other employed as their servants. The wealthy are the Marryots, headed by Sir Robert and wife Lady Jane (Clive Brook and Diana Wynyard. They have two sons, Edward (John Warburton and younger brother Joe (Frank Lawton). The Bridges are headed by Alfred (Herbert Mundin) and wife Ellen (the invaluable Una O'Connor). They have a daughter Fanny (Ursula Jeans).The film opens with Robert going off to fight the Boar War and ends with son Edward coming back from The Great War. That leaves the focus of the film mostly on the women, specifically on Lady Jane who stays home and fears that her husband and then son won't come back. It is a decent performance but not great. The film is very talky and most of that talk is very flat and stiff. Cavalcade leaves you feeling as if you're watching a stage play – which is the last thing you want from a feature film.Diana Wynyard, a darling of the British stage made only a few stopovers in film throughout her long career (this was her second film) but mostly spent her life in the theater. She gives a decent performance here as Lady Jane but it is clear that the theater is still in her blood. She's was not a natural film actor and it is evident in her performance. She got her only Oscar nomination here but lost to Katherine Hepburn, came back to film occasionally but stayed on the stage until her death in 1965.Her legacy would outlive this movie. It is an interesting curio in that it shows us the lives and attitudes of people just a generation into the 20th century, but there's not real tension here. The movie is dusty and flat. There's no passion, no energy. Everyone looks as if they are reading cue-cards. For that reason, Cavalcade is all but forgotten today, a curiosity but not a necessity. Of all the Best Picture winners is has more or less passed out of common knowledge. That's as it should be because, as well intentioned as it is in dealing with war, it is not worth remembering.

. . . since Germany had, with ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, the ONLY foreign movie ever to win the "Best Picture" Oscar (1930). Or perhaps WINGS "started the fire," as the first claimant of this top prize in 1928. But both of these "best pictures" focused on WWI (or "the Great War," as it was called until the 1940s), while the 1933 top Oscar winner, CAVALCADE, is far more diffuse, covering 33 years of British history and even throwing in the kitchen sink! Yes, CAVALCADE is the template for PBS' perennial TV favorites, UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS and DOWNTON ABBEY. As Billy Joe realized when he wrote his #1 hit in 1989 cataloging 119 items of mental furniture for the late Beatnik and early Baby Boomer Generations, a montage of headlines can be enough to create quite sentimental Art, reminding your "target audience" of its Youth. CAVALCADE is quite upfront about its intentions, daring viewers to observe a family (no doubt like themselves--in 1933, that is; AND, you have to count the servants, of course, for the realists in the audience) buffeted by "the cavalcade of the New 20th Century." Why not give household members tickets to the Boer War in South Africa, a place at the front of Queen Victoria's funeral cortège, a space at the railing on the Titanic, a white cross in a WWI cemetery, a knighthood, a showgirl, and a champagne toast on two New Year's Eves to bracket everything else? There's a continuing motif here of "ghost riders in the sky," presumably to symbolize the passing cavalcade of this flick's title. Though it is up to History to determine whether this movie OR Billy Joel's ode will be meaningful at the NEXT turn of a century (when everyone with a living memory of the events of either may have passed on), the superimposed battle sequences of WWI in CAVALCADE are among the most stirring martial art ever presented on screen.

The film follows two London families from the end of 1899 through to 1933, throughout various real-life historical events: the Marryots, an upper-class family; and the Bridges, a family in service who work as the Marryots' live-in maid and butler with their infant daughter. As per the title card, the film is mainly based through the eyes of Mrs Jane Marryot (Diana Wynyard), "a wife and mother whose love tempers both fortune and disaster". I enjoyed the film, it could be the Forrest Gump of its day but more realistic since it covered fewer events and more central characters. Despite their losses, Mr and Mrs Marryot regret nothing come the end of the film and greet their golden years with a philosophical outlook.There is a good mix of drama, romance and a few laughs (Merle Tottenham's overly-nasal character asking "where is Afrey-kerr?" while talking about the Boer War). We are also treated to different perspectives of the events, comparing a young woman thinking how wonderful it is seeing all their men off to war with an older woman stating she was just wondering how many of them would come back alive; as well as comparing the servants downstairs and the family upstairs as Downton Abbey did in a more recent example. I liked how they used the montage effect similar to All Quiet on the Western Front during scenes from the War. Scenes showing emotion or grief tended to be over-done or skimmed over, perhaps to avoid dragging the mood.

Well, I finally got the chance to see this. It's not an easy movie to get a hold of. For several years, now, I had had only two movies outstanding in my quest to see all the Best Picture films, and this was one of them; the other is Wings. Netflix, usually a wonderful source, mysteriously refused to have either of them. Finally, a friend of mine simply *bought* me the two films. I got the chance to watch Cavalcade tonight.Meh. I guess it's reasonably well made, for what it is. But I don't especially care for what it is. Exactly the kind of movie I don't care for, it's more a sequence of events rather than having any coherent plot. Rather a history lesson of the early 20th century, spun around the lives of two families (and to make that work, it sometimes gets rather contrived).But I think what really harms the movie the most for me is simply when it was made. The movie covers the time frame of 1900-1933, the year the film came out. And if you make a movie like this in 1933, you are necessarily going to have a skewed view of history. We, the viewers, know '33 as the year Hitler came to power and set events in motion that would lead to perhaps the biggest event of the century: WWII. But the film, of course, doesn't know that yet, so when it makes a big deal out of the *Boer War*, it's pretty weird, and hard to get all worked up about it. Similarly, from the time of the movie-- and especially the *place* of the movie (it is a British film), I guess it made sense to have the death of Queen Victoria be a big deal, but as a modern American, I really was unable to shake off a profound feeling of "Who cares????" And you might expect that, again, from 1933, the Great Depression might get some coverage. But no. No time for a trivial little thing like the Great Depression, c'mon, we've gotta tell people all about the hell that was the *Boer War*!!! So I'm afraid this film really didn't do it for me. It wasn't awful, I wouldn't list it as the worst Best Picture (I've seen some I positively *hated*, and I didn't hate this). But it wasn't magnificent.