by Chris Marshall:
Why couldn’t King Kong
have won? It was released the same year, and it’s an all-time classic. Instead
I had to watch Cavalcade, adapted
from the Noel Coward play, and it was a chore. It was more like a series of
vignettes set during various important moments in British history between 1900
and 1929 than a single narrative. The net result was a disjointed mishmash of
events that couldn’t hold my interest, no matter how hard I tried.
In general, I object to describing a movie as “boring,”
particularly if it’s used as a pejorative. When people say a film is boring,
they generally mean that it is unexciting, which is a major difference. Ingmar
Bergman’s Winter Light, one of the
greatest of all films, is extremely slow and methodical. It could quite
accurately be called boring. But that’s exactly what it means to be. The characters’ lives were, for the most part, dull
and uninteresting, so it only made sense for the movie to reflect that.
Here lies the problem with Cavalcade. This is presumably a very exciting—if tragic—period in
British history. Yet, despite everything that happens, from the Second Boer War
to the sinking of the Titanic to the outbreak of World War I, I never cared
about anything that happens. It was slow, unexciting, and, yes, boring, but it
made no sense within the context of the movie. I kept praying for it to be over
already, but it seemed like the end would never come.
