Cavalcade

Snobbery, sentimentality and jingoism run riot in Noël Coward's pageant of life as experienced by an 'ordinary' British family (and their comic relief servants) from Boer War and death of the dear old queen to date. 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. The interpolated war footage was the work of William Cameron Menzies.