"THE PICTURE OF THE GENERATION!"
A cavalcade of English life from New Year's Eve 1899 until 1933 is seen through the eyes of well-to-do Londoners Jane and Robert Marryot. Amongst events touching their family are the Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Great War.
Diana Wynyard
Jane Marryot
Clive Brook
Robert Marryot
Una O'Connor
Ellen Bridges
Herbert Mundin
Alfred Bridges
Beryl Mercer
Cook
Irene Browne
Margaret Harris
Tempe Pigott
Mrs. Snapper
Merle Tottenham
Annie
Frank Lawton
Joe Marryot
A cavalcade of English life from New Year's Eve 1899 until 1933 is seen through the eyes of well-to-do Londoners Jane and Robert Marryot. Amongst events touching their family are the Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Great War.
Noël Coward is at his most unashamedly jingoistic with this triple-Oscar winning depiction of the lives and loves, trials and tribulations of the well-to-do "Marryot" family - "Jane" (Diana Wynyard) and husband "Robert" (Clive Brook) and of the working class "Bridges" - Herbert Mundin ("Fred") and Una O'Connor ("Ellen") and their respective children. This episodically styled melodrama, for that is largely what it is, straddles the periods of British history from the late 1800s, through the fairly seismic death of Queen Victoria, the ensuing gentile Edwardian era until the clouds of war gather in the early 1910s testing everyone's mettle and finally to the aftermath of the Great War. It proves to be quite an interesting observation of deference and class, of aspiration and resentment - and both O'Connor and Wynyard play their parts well. The rest of it is a bit lacklustre, though - it seems little better than a sentimentally written chronology, bedecked with union jacks and rousing Chopin and Strauss to paper over any attempts to look seriously at the pretty profound social changes occurring in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe over this time period. That it beat Cukor's "Lady for a Day" for the trophy in 1934 has always surprised me - but at least it gave Una O'Connor a chance to stop playing the maid!
Summer 1939. Influential families in Nazi Germany have sent their daughters to a finishing school in an English seaside town to learn the language and be ambassadors for a future looking National Socialist. A teacher there sees what is coming and is trying to raise the alarm. But the authorities believe he is the problem.
A chronicle of the lives of the Gibbons family, from shortly after the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second.
A middle-aged man recalls his childhood growing up in and around London during World War II.
During World War II, a young man is called up and, with an increasing sense of foreboding, undertakes his army training ready for D-Day, June 6th, 1944.
The lives of three young men, a German and two Americans, during WWII.
Fr. Hugh O'Flaherty is a Vatican official in 1943-45 who has been hiding downed pilots, escaped prisoners of war, and Italian resistance families. His activities become so large that the Nazis decide to assassinate him the next time he leaves the Vatican.
When the Great War breaks out, brothers Roy and Monte Rutledge, each attending Oxford University, enlist with the Royal Flying Corps.
At the tense 1938 Munich Conference, former friends who now work for opposing governments become reluctant spies racing to expose a Nazi secret.
Diplomats, soldiers and other representatives of a dozen nations fend off the siege of the International Compound in Peking during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. The disparate interests unite for survival despite competing factions, overwhelming odds, delayed relief and tacit support of the Boxers by the Empress of China and her generals.
In May 1940, the fate of World War II hangs on Winston Churchill, who must decide whether to negotiate with Adolf Hitler or fight on knowing that it could mean the end of the British Empire.