Noel Coward's highly successful London-set stage play "Cavalcade" was adapted for the big screen and became the distaff film winner of the 6th Academy Award. Hailed as, "A love that suffered and rose triumphant above the crushing events of this modern age! The march of time measured by a mother's heart!" Cavalcade is the story of two interconnected families.

Further tagged as the, "Picture of the Generation", the movie opens with upper class Robert and Jane Marryot (Clive Brook and Diana Wynyard) returning home to toast the new century on New Year's Eve 1899. Their maid and butler, Ellen and Alfred Bridges (Una O'Connor and Herbert Mundin), join them and the two families journey through the times of late Victorian England.

With both Robert and Alfred joining the army to fight in the Boer War the cavalcade of twentieth century events spoken in the film's title begins with them boarding ships to fight in a far-off land. Over 34 years both fathers return home safely from service in South Africa just as Robert and Jane's boys, Edward (John Warburton/Dick Henderson) and Joe (Frank Lawton/Douglas Scott), grow into adulthood as does Ellen and Alfred's daughter, Fanny (Ursula Jeans/Bonita Granville).

Along the way Alfred buys a bar but is killed in the street by a passing carriage during a drunken brawl. Edward falls in love with a childhood friend named Edith (Margaret Lindsay/Sheila MacGill) but dies on the ill-fated Titanic. Joe longs for war and enlists against Germany in 1914. Fanny turns her childhood fascination with dance and song into a career and falls in love with Joe although he's killed at the end of World War I before they can marry.

Robert and Jane remain in love and prosper even as they are crushed under the weight of changing times. Ellen grows older enjoying the comforts provided by her daughter's career success and the movie ends on New Year's Eve 1933 on the eve of a new global conflict centered in Nazi Germany.

Seen through the prism of maturity, suffering and remarkable optimism best expressed through the Marryots and their concluding remarks, Cavalcade becomes a highly literary condemnation of war and needless sacrifice. To the extent the film is successful is in its small-scale, intimate encounters between two or three characters in conversation. Likely stemming from Coward's play as adapted by Reginald Berkeley, some of these moments seem pedantic. Yet their overall effect is to sketch a class-stratified microcosm of early twentieth century British society to conjure a sense of its struggle to remain pre-eminent in the world.

Where the film strays from being a completely successful screen drama is in the sharp criticism it focuses on war, generally, and the resulting negative effects on Britain as symbolized by the fates of the Marryots and Bridges. Though the sentiment is undeniably resonant, it can seem stagy and overly theatrical, especially when included in theatrical soliloquy to the camera. Even as the actors and actresses work to convince us of their struggles and problems they address us as if we are a live audience, or else an external device for expressing their internal psychological states. This break from dramatic tension eliminates much of the script's continuity and ruins part of the movie's overall effect.

Partially the fault of Academy Award-winning director, Frank Lloyd, and partially the purpose of the Coward source text, Cavalcade's vignette structure from 1899 through 1933 builds this artificial organization into human events. That this structure includes a number of implausible coincidences lets the movie include a sweeping historical ark often considered fulfilling to movie critics simply for the epic scale. Such coincidences can be useful for encouraging audience excitement and giving opportunities to showcase elements of a film's production design, William S. Darling's work on this project as a particularly terrific example. Such coincidence also stretches believability when we are asked to accept that at least one of the seven members of the Marryot and Bridges families experience the Boer War, Queen Victoria's funeral procession, the Titanic's maiden voyage, World War I, zeppelin raids on London and the armistice of 1918.

Curiously one trope borrowed for the production from silent movies to make sense of its historical ark is the explanatory title used to set the filmmaker's point-of-view and define the film's setting. Opening the picture with a few paragraphs we're given a common foundation along with other titles sprinkled throughout the film's length giving us the year for what's happening on-screen. This kind of title use is both a strength and weakness. While the film's 34-year journey is put in chronological order to make events more sensible, especially with regards to Edward, Joe and Fanny who become adults in the movie, it's also an artificial means to order dramatic events instead of letting elements within the script given them a natural purpose.

Cavalcade ends up being domestic melodrama that remains inoffensive though very specifically dated to its moment of production. This obsolescence isn't just due to the period covered in the narrative but instead comes from its British pre-occupation in a world long since dominated by a new American empire in the second half of the twentieth century. However necessary the period of 1899-1933 may be, the film is a kind of archival imprint of what we once thought of ourselves as we thought about a period in our history.

For the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences the 1932-1933 voting year was dominated by this depiction of recent British life, as much for its currency to adults come of age in the early twentieth century as from its relatively rich production value. In the year's awards competition were included nine other films nominated as Outstanding Production. At least seven of those titles, A Farewell to Arms, 42nd Street, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Little Women, The Private Life of Henry VIII, She Done Him Wrong and State Fair, have enjoyed long lives since their original release. All have been included in retrospectives, historical studies and celebrations of the cinema and at least three of them, 42nd Street, Little Women and State Fair, have been the source material for movie remakes.

The other two nominated Outstanding Productions were Lady for a Day and Smilin' Thru and although both titles have a place in history, they have largely been forgotten by subsequent generations of moviegoers. Still, there were three overlooked movies that passing times have affirmed as being particularly important.

The first is the granddaddy of all horror, science fiction and fantasy movies, King Kong. The second is the classic Marx Brothers vehicle, Duck Soup, and the third is the special effects masterstroke The Invisible Man. In noting these three films that have each contributed more to the legacy of moviedom than any of the nominated pictures from 1932-1933 I'm also highlighting a bias within the Academy concerning genre films.

As horror movies King Kong and The Invisible Man are both superior productions that advanced screen technologies, captivated audiences, earned top box office dollars and showcased subjects not previously put to film. Duck Soup, too, is the Marx Brothers's irreverent look at social mores along with Groucho's direct address asides commenting on the state of society.

All three movies are classics. All three are still building legions of fans. All three were written off as genre productions in the most pejorative sense of the term meaning formulaic, low brow and decidedly unsophisticated despite their complexities and layers of rich production value.

Thus the Academy saw fit to award Cavalcade, a fine, though dated, play-turned-movie, with its top award. It's good but totally devoted to its moment with an oddly unaffecting sentiment despite certain resonance that would seem easily paralleled in current times.