Most critics admire Cavalcade, and the warmest notices are the ones written on its release. The praise clusters on Frank Lloyd’s direction and on the scale of the production: the sweep of the narrative across decades, the restraint with which it is handled, and the care taken over settings and casting. Diana Wynyard is named again and again as the performance that carries the picture, with Clive Brook and Frank Lawton also singled out.
The spread is wide and it runs along the years. The two negative reviews are the recent ones. Time Out finds the film sunk by snobbery, sentimentality and jingoism, with a staginess inherited from Coward’s play. Film Stories calls it sickly and pandering, its melodrama wearing thin early, while conceding some robust performances. Even the broadly approving New Yorker notes that the plot drags and that most of the acting is ordinary. There are no mixed verdicts: critics either warm to it or do not.