Frank Lloyd | Cavalcade / 1933

keeping the campfires burning

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reginald Berkeley (screenplay, with Sonya Levien, continuity, based on the play by Noël Coward), Frank Lloyd (director) Cavalcade / 1933

 

Lord Mountbatten on Noël Coward:

 

“There are probably greater painters than Noël, greater novelists than Noël, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars. If there are, they are fourteen different people. Only one man combined all fourteen different labels – The Master.”

     Yet as even Mountbatten hints, Coward the master was not equally the “master” of all he attempted to accomplish. If on some days we was his own wonderful invention, a witty, self-infatuated, self-enchanted quipster, on his off-days he was alas as boring and conservative as Terrence Rattigan. And it was clearly the latter mask that led him to write the hit play Cavalcade (1931) with a cast of hundreds as it oh so thrillingly took a Victorian family via a recurring cavalcade through the Boer War, Queen Victoria’s Death, the sinking of the Titanic, World War I, and numerous other smaller family sad occasions.

      The suffering Jane Marryot (Diana Wynyard) loses her two sons, Edward (John Warburton) who drowns with his newlywed wife Edith Harris (Margaret Lindsay) aboard the RMS Titanic, and Joe to the battlefields of WWI along with the respectability of the family with his stage-door courtship of Fanny Bridges, the family’s former maid’s (Una O’Connor) daughter. Jane’s stiff upper-lip, class consciousness, and almost always tearful mien finally lost me as well, with the help of the Oxfordian Joe, who once the war had been announced simply couldn’t stop declaiming “marvelous,” “isn’t it all marvelous?”

      Cavalcade, made into a movie by Frank Lloyd in 1933, is the kind of film like David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Delbert Mann’s version of Rattigan’s Separate Tables (1958) that demands you to love it if you’re British. But for others, it is a bit hard to know what all the fuss is about. And, of course, I’d forgotten all about the Boer War, and had to Google it to rediscover that it concerned England’s attempt to take over the colonial rule of the Dutch in South Africa, particularly once the gold mines were discovered. The Marryots love another dearly, but don’t like the way things are heading over time, and feel just awful about their sexual inclinations—or those of their sons.

    To give it credit, Coward’s film is strongly anti-war and mocks a great deal of the class consciousness it quietly dictates. But I finally gave the film up entirely when the absolutely “marvelous” girlfriend of Joe Marryot, Fanny (Ursula Jeans)—appearing at a private party where Coward reveals just how awful things have gotten by showing a lesbian couple engaged in conversation before turning his camera on two tuxedoed homo gents, one awarding the other a slave bracelet—belts out Coward’s own "Twentieth Century Blues.” And all this after a  mise-en-scène of various forms of social, political, and fanatical war-mongering and refusals to face the facts of how bad things have gotten!

 

     I presume our friend Noël also wrote this passage with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, but it’s hard to know. After all, he did write this popular mess, which probably paid for a great many gold slave bracelets. But I cannot help but wonder if, despite the humor of his lyrics, Coward hadn’t just before he sat down to pen this pretentious family historical tract, gone out in the midday sun a few too many times. 

      Yet I must admit, the pretentions of the servant class in this film are quite clearly embarrassing, behaving as if they were Americans. Goodbye dear old England, do keep the campfires burning, I may even pop in again to warm up to that song’s composer Ivor Novello’s reassuring visage.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2022

(Reprinted from World Cinema Review, September 2022).