आलोचक समीक्षाएं

However moved or indifferent one may be to the joys and heartaches of the very British Marryots, Bridges, their butler, and Ellen, his wife: Cavalcade is a necessary addition to one's cinematic education as an example of screen technique at its best. [15 Apr 1933, p.22]

A gloriously, heart-rendingly beautiful, stirring picture of a generation in British family life.

A rare beauty. Noel Coward, in an atypically serious venture, traces 30 years of a British family's life.

Cavalcade is a fine, splendid document of the folly and resultant decline of civilization through the tragedies of war. It is Noel Coward’s contribution to the cause of peace and, as such, it is effective historic pageantry.

It is unfurled with such marked good taste and restraint that many an eye will be misty after witnessing this production.

Cavalcade is about as well made as that subject could have been made for the screen. At first thought it would seem too foreign a matter for American consumption, but it’s the first big historical epic on England that means something over here. It’s so powerful and embracing that the matter of nationality and background is lost, or forgotten.

Cavalcade's anti-war message is presented with more subtlety than that in Wings and All Quiet on the Western Front. The story is more concerned with the potential of death than it is with actual tragedy - how those left behind live in a constant state of anxiety, never knowing if their loved one is going to appear on a casualty list.

In picture form, Cavalcade is a superlative newsreel, forcibly strengthened by factual scenes, good music, and wonderful photography. It is marred by pat and obvious dramatic climaxes, and by a conclusion which is anti-climactical and meaningless.

It’s rife with fey, unintentional camp like the scene in which a newlywed couple pledge eternal love on the deck of an ocean liner — only to move away and reveal a life preserver labeled Titanic. Cavalcade really won its Oscar because of Hollywood’s raging Anglophilia — the insecure sense that if a character says, ”Let’s all have a cup of tea!” the movie must be art.

Nary a tear-jerking trick is missed (our family loses one son to the Titanic, the other to World War I), and the strangulation is compounded by the staginess since the film, at Coward's insistence, slavishly followed the Drury Lane production.