Le Monde en marche

The World Moves On (1934)

** (out of 4)

Flat look at two families, the Warburtons and the Girards, who are bound by marriage in 1825 and form a business that places parts of the family in England, America and Germany. All is well until WWI breaks out and soon the families are torn on all issues. I've read numerous reports saying that director John Ford never cared for this film and rumor has it that Fox was really hounding him to film screenplays the way they were written and not to go so far off track. Rumor has it that Ford did exactly that here and turned in a pretty lifeless movie just to prove a point to the studio. Of course, this has never been proved to my knowledge but if you watch the film it's easy to see why this might be the case. I've seen dozens of films from the legendary director and there's no question that he's made some duds throughout but THE WORLD MOVES ON should have been a classic but the end result is so lifeless that you can't help but think there was something going on behind the scenes. Ford has always been great at showing patriotism but that's missing here and it plays an important part of the picture. There are many actions scenes scattered throughout but none of them contain any energy and they come across so flat that it seems like they just set the camera up and started shooting without trying to do anything special. This is especially true during some horrendous comedy moments with Stepin Fetchit, which are just so embarrassing that you really wonder what the director was thinking. I know Fetchit appeared in several Ford films and the image that he plays rubs a lot of people the wrong way but no matter how you view it the way the character here is used is just bad. Performances are pretty good from the leads (Franchot Tone, Madeleine Carroll, Reginald Denny) but they're certainly letdown by the direction. The look of the film is quite good and there's a very interesting story here but sadly it just never comes to life. I think with more care there's a classic movie here.

Besides being directed by one of Hollywood's all-time great directors, June 1934's "The World Moves On" was noted for one monumental change in cinema that impacted movies for the next thirty years. The John Ford-directed film was the first Hollywood movie to receive the binding stamp of approval from the newly-established Production Code Administration (PCA) under its newly-appointed director, Joseph Breen. Front-ending the movie is a statement from the PCA that it and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America approved the picture, stamping it Certificate No. 1.

The Pre-Code era was over. From 1929 through the middle of 1934, the MPDDA, under the rather lax supervision of William Hays, was an organization set up by Hollywood studios to fend off federal, state and local attempts to censor their movies. State and local bureaus continued to exert some minor tweaking in their censoring. But it was up to the small, overworked staff at the Hays Office to largely suggest to the studios to adhere to a code that was wide in its scope but was flouted by the industry. The Office's rulings weren't binding, proving it wasn't able to prevent the release of questionable movies for the nation's studio-affiliated theater chains. As one trade publication reported, "the Hays moral code is not even a joke any more; it's just a memory."

The Catholic Legion of Decency and other religious organizations were upset with the slack enforcement of the Production Code and threatened to boycott movie theaters until Hollywood cleaned up its act. The studios became nervous facing the possibility of seeing their industry shrink. They collectively agreed to have staunch Catholic and supervisor for the MPDDA public relations department, Joseph Breen, be appointed as the president of the newly-established PCA. Breen came in with an iron clad series of strict enforcement policies that prohibited any movie from being shown in the nation's major theaters without the PCA stamp of approval. Hollywood readily accepted the new rules.

Breen's power in Hollywood lasted until the mid-1950s. Liberty Magazine described his tremendous scope as having, "More influence in standardizing world thinking than Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin." His strength lay in a 1915 Supreme Court decision ruling movies did not enjoy any First Amendment rights, which restricted cinema's freedom of expression. Forty years later the Supreme Court reversed its 1915 ruling and gave cinema certain rights of free expression and speech. But it took several years more years as Hollywood tinkered around the edges before the mid-1960s, when the studios finally were given the freedom that even pre-code producers would envy.

"The World Moves On" didn't cause Breen and his newly-appointed lieutenants any problems. Wilfred Sheehan, Fox Films chief of productions, took special interest in this movie. He insisted the Reginald Berkeley script, similar to the Academy Awards' 1933 Best Picture "Cavalcade," be filmed to a "t." Director Ford hated the screenplay, and felt it needed tightening. In a later interview, Ford described how Sheehan was adamant on the importance of each scene, and the producer told the director in no uncertain terms to film exactly the way it was scripted. The director did, noting in later interviews the picture was "a bunch of crap."

"The World Moves On" begins in the early 1800s, examining two cotton trading families in America and in England. The picture then jumps to World War One and contains outstanding war sequences, some of the footage gleaned from a war documentary. Film critics at the time, such as The New York Times, noted it was "an ambitious undertaking, well composed and photographed, but it does seem as though the film would be all the better if it were shortened," while the Chicago Tribune wrote it had one fault: its "extreme length." Ford's instincts proved correct. No producer since has dared to demand as Sheehan had that the director follow a script to a 't.' Ford soon left Fox Films and went to Columbia Pictures, leaving the only studio he had ever worked at for over 17 years.

Part of a seemingly endless stream of WWI films that attempted to process the trauma of that war or bemoan the fact that it happened and was the most barbaric one in recent memory. The World Moves On falls more comfortably into the former camp, although the way in which it conflates familial loyalty and national comity, particularly through the avenue of financial connectedness, comes off a little tone-deaf. And to be honest, the central drama of the family weathering the tides of time was rather tepid and uninvolving, for the most part. The film's strongest segment was the war itself, which captured its chaos and neverendingness in an extended montage. The film's ending attempts to reconcile the impending feeling of another war on the horizon with the hope that the "family" will continue on as before. But when that "family" is so tied up with Old World sentiments that, through blindness and idealism, led WWI to sneak up on them, it rings hollow. Those Old World certainties are dead, and the liberal myopia that led them into the conflict needs to die as well. As a film, I admire the craft that John Ford put on display, but it left a bit to be desired thematically.

There is one bit of dialog that I feel needs to be revisited. The husband says "Are you ready dear?" to his wife before she drops him off at a train station. Her response: "Of course dear, I've been ready for over an hour." This, which is a statement that has never been uttered again by a wife whilst getting ready to be somewhere, and the character Dixie played by Stepin Fetchit (it's surprising how offensive his character plays almost 80 years after this movie was made), are the only two memorable parts in this multi-generational tale directed by John Ford. I don't mean to trivialize this great artists' work, as he earned every accolade ever thrown his way, but this is a hiccup in a nearly flawless career. There are lessons to be learned here about avarice and lust for power, but they're sort of brushed over, because, as it turns out it's difficult to tell a story that spans 100 years in under 2 hours. Just remember to put those who love you and have stuck by you first and you don't need to spend the time seeing this. Rating 16/40

Most notable for being the very first movie passed by the Hays Office at the birth of the Motion Picture Production Code, receiving Certificate #1 from the board, John Ford's The World Moves On is worthwhile for more than just that historical footnote. A family saga akin to Anthony Mann's The Furies, it tells the story of a large cotton conglomeration with presence in the US, England, France, and Germany begun in the 1820s as it enters the 1910s and The Great War rears its ugly head. Loyalties get crisscrossed as the backdrop to a love story between two people, and then the movie doesn't find its narrative resolution for another decade. Contemporary reviews complained of the film, calling it way too long (a curious charge with a film that's about 100 minutes long), but I disagree. It's about half an hour too short.

The film begins in 1825 at the reading of the will of the Girard patriarch, cotton baron. His will sets forth the demands that his heirs split the company into four, one for each country, and run it in a way that puts the family and its needs first. In all of this is Richard Girard (Franchot Tone), set to take the reins of the American operation based in Louisiana. He sees the wife of a cousin, the beautiful Mrs. Warburton (Madeleine Carroll). They have a spark, but they are soon to be separated by thousands of miles and the Atlantic Ocean when her husband takes control of the English operations.

One of the more interesting things about the film is that Tone and Carroll play not only these 1824 characters but also their progeny in 1914. Richard's great grandson, also named Richard, is prepared to welcome the different branches of the family back in America for a celebration at the nearly 100 years of great work they have all done, and invited is Mary Warburton, great granddaughter of Mrs. Warburton. She is engaged to the German cousin Erik von Gerhardt (Reginald Denny), but when Mary and Richard meet, it's like the spark that their ancestors had shared carried over the years and they instantly feel a connection. There's falling in love at first sight in movies, and then there's providing interesting subtext and even a sense of magic to the idea.

The family is coming together to celebrate 90 years of success, and also to talk about the impending sense of war that is gripping the world. It's obvious that they'll need to strengthen their ties and gird for the upcoming disruption, and then they split to do their parts in the different parts of the world.

When war breaks out, Richard is in France, and he joins up with the French army to fight. Like Hawks' The Road to Glory and Ford's own Pilgrimage, most of the footage of battle is taken from the French film Wooden Crosses, and like Pilgrimage, the battle material is never the point. It's a small sliver of the larger story that Ford is trying to tell, and that story is the fraying of the family in the face of a world war. When Richard goes to England on leave, he meets up with Mary and quickly marries her, effectively ending her engagement to Erik. The family is unable to move goods from one branch to another because of the dangers at sea as well as the embargoes countries are putting up.

The war ends, and it feels like the story is going to come to an end as well. This is where the complaints that the movie is too long come from. With about twenty minutes left, we get the Roaring 20s where Richard becomes a megalomaniacal power mad businessman, making Mary feel abandoned in the process, and then the Stock Market Crash that brings everything down all of a sudden. The two have to move back to Louisiana from New York to rebuild. Thinking of the saga part of family saga, I really wanted this part to be at least an hour long, detailing Richard's change into a giant butt obsessed with money over family in the easy money times of the 20s after the hardships of the 10s. Instead, we get a contracted bit that feels like an extended coda that just happens to have some of the most important story bits in it.

Overall, the film is pretty good. A condensed saga that really could have either used more time to tell its full story or an earlier end point at the conclusion of the part of the film about the war. It's solidly made (even though Ford seemingly wanted nothing to do with the film during production) and acted. It could have been much more than it ended up being, but what it is ends up good enough to entertain.