The World Moves On (1934) User Reviews

The Rothschilds of Cotton

[bkoganbing · 5/10 · 14 January 2017]

For a John Ford film this one is usually not mentioned in any retrospectives I know concerning his career. For a film that is internationalistic in scope it gets sadly neglected.

Another reviewer compared The World Moves On to Cavalcade which came out a year earlier. For me this film most closely resembled The House Of Rothschild only instead of money the commodity is cotton and in the 19th century. In some places cotton was considered a kind of currency like in the American south. In 1825 the American family Girard merges with the British Warburtons and then has other sons settle in France and Germany just like Nathan Rothschild's kids as early proponents of globalism.

After an 1825 prologue the action skips to 1914 where Sig Ruman of the German branch is hosting a big blowout with nary a thought to a possible war breaking out. War and the Roaring 20s type materialistic peace that followed are what is dealt with.

By the way also watching this film I did wonder just how the combine managed to weather the American Civil War. But that was never mentioned.

The film focuses on Franchot Tone of the American branch and Madeleine Carroll of the English Warburtons. They marry and she jilts Reginald Denny of the German branch in the process. Then Tone almost on a lark enlists in the French Army. The family with losses both financial and personal carries on though.

Shoehorned into the film is Stepin Fetchit in a real travesty of a role. He's the family retainer as he usually is. Here he spots some French Senegalese African soldiers in dress uniforms and he thinks it's a lodge and wants to join. Of course he's eagerly recruited. Today's viewers might not realize but the popular Amos N' Andy radio show had their protagonists as members of the Mystic Knights Of The Sea Lodge. That reference to a lodge would not have been lost on a 1934 viewer. Stepin Fetchit's role adds zero to the story and it's more offensive than usual.

Best part of The World Moves On are the battle scenes in World War I. They are not glamorized in any way, hardly like one of Ford's cavalry epics.

I rate The World Moves On as low as I do because of Stepin Fetchit. Had he not been there this would far higher on John Ford's list of films for quality.

Hasn't aged that well

[brchthethird · 6/10 · 28 December 2023]

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.

First Movie Certified Under the New Jospeh Breen Censorship

[springfieldrental · 7/10 · 18 March 2023]

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.

plot

[andrenalin_04 · 19 August 2008]

In the tradition of Fox Studios' Oscar-winning Cavalcade, The World Moves On covers over one hundred years in the lives of two Louisiana families: The Girards, of French extraction, and the Warburtons, formerly of Manchester. Forming an alliance by marriage in 1825, the families rapidly corner the cotton business in the South. Years later, three of Girard/Warburton sons split up to head business operations in England, France and Germany: as a result, descendants of the original families find themselves fighting on opposite sides during WW I (this episode is similar to a memorable sequence in the 1928 silent Four Sons, which like World Moves On was directed by John Ford). Surviving the war, Richard (Franchot Tone), the last of the descendants becomes a sharkish Wall Street speculator in the 1920s, ultimately losing his fortune in the Wall Street Crash. Bloody but unbowed, Richard and his wife Mary (Madeleine Carroll) cut their losses and return to their ancestral home, to start all over again. Both The World Moves On and the subsequent Fox production Road to Glory rely to a considerable extent upon stock footage from the grim 1931 French antiwar drama Wooden Crosses.

Condensed Saga

[davidmvining · 7/10 · 22 November 2021]

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.

Stilted drama: for fans of Madeleine Carroll only.

[rfkeser · 4/10 · 27 November 1999]

Starting in the Civil War South like an across-the-generations romance in the manner of SMILIN' THROUGH, this stilted drama then slogs through World War I and the Great Depression like an American CAVALCADE. John Ford effectively showcases the luminous Madeleine Carroll [including a QUEEN CHRISTINA-like moment of gazing out to sea], but otherwise directs with little commitment to the material. Franchot Tone conveys zero chemistry with his leading lady, so he just goes through the motions, while Ford favorite Stepin Fetchit works his offensive "shuffling darkie" routine, but in Paris. The screenplay seems especially turgid since the situations are arbitrary and reveal little about the characters. Despite an occasional imaginative touch, this all makes for a long 107 minutes.

For John Ford Completists only

[lorenellroy · 1/10 · 20 October 2007]

This 1934 movie is largely unknown and considering it was directed by John Ford this may seem surprising .Yet even quite exhaustive surveys of his work either omit references to this movie entirely or else give it only a passing mention.Now that I have seen it I feel that this is not really surprising after all .It is bombastic ,muddled and confused ,with a -for me -unacceptable pacifistic line .It is the product of an isolationist mind set and I found it morally repugnant .Thankfully ,it is not very good and so it is possible to dislike it on artistic grounds as well.

In form it is a family or dynastic saga ,split into a number of eras .It opens in 1825 in New Orleans as the family of a dead fabrics baron assemble for the reading of his will .The estate is split between branches of the family in the US -as represented by Franchot Tone -,England ,France and Germany .The rest of the action is this segment consists of Tone killing a ,man in a duel for insulting Madelaine Carroll.She and Tone have a mutual attraction but she is engaged to someone else and the affair is not consummated .

The movie then moves forward to Europe immediately before World War 1 .The family gathers for a dynastic wedding .Tone and Carroll re-appear ,both playing descendants of the people they portrayed in the opening section of the movie.There are hints -conveyed by their response to a particular piece of music -that they have some kind of "deja vu" connected with their ancestors previous relationship but this potentially intriguing theme is never pursued .War breaks out and the family splits on national grounds .Tone joins the French Foreign Legion to take up arms against Germany but others respond in less sensible ways.Carroll defies the orders of the government and refuses to make munitions (an act of treason which bizarrely Ford seems to agree with)while a key member of the French side of the family joins the priesthood as a gesture against the war .

The last part of the movie takes place in the 1920's .Tone is now a tycoon and an absolute megalomaniac driven by greed and a lust for power.The crash of 1929 sees him reappraise his life and values and take a "peace ,love and understanding ,man" approach to life .

There are some good things about the picture .The scenes of wartime action ,without recourse to graphic violence ,do depict the horrors of war well but overall this is a sprawling mess of a movie .The episodic structure and the obvious striving after "significance "allied to a propensity to preach at the audience make it tedious .The last 10 minutes is essentially a lightly dramatised and sententious pacifist tract and as wishy washy as such farragoes of nonsense invariably are .One section is particularly offensive ,It involves newsreel footage of Hitler ,Mussolini and Japanese militarists and the British navy .

Different and prophetical: a forgotten masterpiece

[le_mag_pereira · 10/10 · 14 December 2012]

Until I actually watched it, I had never heard of "The World Goes On". The name of director John Ford was what called my attention, although I was already familiar with its stars, Madeleine Carroll and Franchot Tone, because I had watched both in 1935 films, respectively "The 39 Steps" and "Mutiny on the Bounty".

The story is about two families that are partners in the cotton business. It all starts in 1825, when Richard Girard (Tone) becomes partner of Mary Warburton's (Carroll) husband, but falls for her. She comes back to England and never sees him again, but it comes that, 89 years later, their great-grandchildren, with their same names, get to know each other and fall in love. Mary leaves an almost-groom and marries Robert during the war, in which he participates as a soldier in France's Foreign Legion. What comes is the many changes the business faces during and after the war, with its owners, like Richard's cousins, each in one different country.

Almost all the film is a regular historical drama, but near the end it becomes unforgettable, because it perfectly predicts World War II. Talking about a war after it happened is very easy, but mentioning it before it starts is the cleverest thing movies could have done. The sequence of images even shows some of the countries who were later involved in the conflict, like Germany, Italy, England and Japan. If WWII hasn't happened, this end would be a huge flaw and would be deleted in further releases. But it happened, and being able to foresee it in 1934 is, at least, amazing.

Of course, no one can pass without noticing Dixie (Stepin Fetchit) and the horrible black stereotype. It was certainly a funny character in the 30s and it would also be today, considering his messes, if he wasn't shown as a feeble-minded. This is a sin not only John Ford committed in that time, but maybe we can forgive him of it and let ourselves be touched by the final image of this surprising film.

A hiccup in a great career

[cwhaskell · 4/10 · 19 December 2010]

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

The Blame Goes to Ford Here

[Michael_Elliott · 11 February 2012]

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.

war footage interesting; not much else

[mgoodwin88 · 2/10 · 11 June 2008]

Aside from a couple of shots, it would be almost impossible to tell that John Ford directed this if you didn't see the credits. There is an astonishingly good combat sequence, but apparently most of this footage comes from a French film that Fox bought a few years before Ford made World in '34. Nonetheless, the combat stuff is breath-taking, and very well integrated with studio footage of the principals. Stepin Fetchit has some good lines. Some nice compositions show that Ford (or his cinematographer) wasn't totally disengaged. The multi-generational love story with its mystical overtones seems totally out of character for Ford, but the opening and closing shots of Christ on the cross remind us of Ford's lifelong religiosity.

A muddling mess of ideas covered through glorious wrapping paper.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 22 March 2020]

If this film had stuck to its one major plot device (romantic tribulations during the time of Workd War I), it might have been a nice A picture without pretentions or the unnecessary prelude set in 1825 in New Orleans. The goings on of that five minutes of exposition is really only dealt briefly in this John Ford saga which easily could have been cut down to 90 minutes.

The bland Franchot Tone was fine as a second lead but to be the focus completely in a film (going from the 1825 sequences up to the early 1920's makes it difficult to be truly interested. His leading lady in both 1825 and after is the beautiful Madeline Carroll, a regal block of ice. Two stereotypical performances add either unintentional comedy (Sig Ruman as a heavily accented German accent that overaccentuates the rolled r's and other letters) or bad taste disguised as comedy (Stepin Fetchit in an unnecessary role) and damper the film's impact.

Listen for a beautifully sung version of "Ave Maria" where the man singing could easily be referred to as the Mario Lanza of his time. the war sequences are well photographed and the film has a very opulent look about it, but ultimately it is missing the one element in a saga that makes it unforgettable: characters that you care about.

Interesting and sweeping in its scope.

[planktonrules · 8/10 · 13 May 2010]

This movie reminds me a bit of the best picture film, "Cavalcade", that was made a year before "The World Moves On". Both stories are set over a very long time period and involve a wealthy family during good times and bad--the bad being WWI. However, there are also a lot of differences--enough that it's well worth seeing both films.

The film begins in the early 19th century. At the death of a so-called 'Cotton King', his will is read and it gives amazingly detailed instructions about his estate. To satisfy the conditions of the will, the family must make a business merger and then send its family members to set up a business empire in the major industrialized nations at the time--France, Prussia (later, to make up a large part of Germany), Britain and, of course, the United States. Through the decades, the family ties remain strong--even after there are distinct lines of the new family that speak different languages. The idea is that despite national interests, the family and the company come first. However, this is all complicated 90 years later when WWI arrives. And, surprisingly, the film continues from the end of WWI to the Depression and its impact on the family.

The film has excellent production values and clearly was a project that Fox Studio heaped a lot of money on--with lots of fancy sets, an up and coming director (John Ford) and a pretty good cast headed by Franchot Tone and Madeleine Carroll. For the most part, the writing was also first-rate and the film quite enjoyable. There were only a couple things I really disliked about the film. First, subsequent generations of family members are played by the same actors in several cases--as if descendants look EXACTLY like their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents. This is a stupid Hollywood cliché--as this does not happen in real life--even with families where incest is all the rage!! Second, for 'comic relief' for the WWI scenes, Steppin Fetchit is cast--even though he has NOTHING to do with the movie. And no, he does not play the 'black sheep' of the family! He is simply a walking, talking negative racial stereotype that was very popular in the 30s but which makes almost everyone cringe today (and it should). Also, the notion of a need for COMEDY during WWI is brainless and misguided to say the least! What part of 11,000,000 war dead is funny?!

Now you should be able to look past these two problem areas with the film and if you stick with it, the movie is pretty amazing for its scope, its very brutal scenes of warfare (some of the most harrowing of the era, in fact) and its rather non-partisan stand--which was quite the rage in the early to mid-1930s--when most Americans had come to accept that this war had no good guys or bad guys--only many victims. Of course, WWII and the rise of Hitlerism in the years following this film would change this attitude considerably. Still, it's a mostly forgotten fact that practically all films about WWI made in America during the 1930s were very critical of the war and took a neutral stance on it--as was also true of many of the films in France (such as "Grand Illusion" and "J'Accuse!") as well as Germany up until the Nazis took control ("Westfront 1918"). Plus, I was amazed that the movie dared to criticize the rise of nationalism and fascism in the 1930s--they were correct, but Hollywood (aside from this film) pretty much ignored this until AFTER WWII had already begun!

By the way, you probably could guess that I am a history teacher and film buff--hence all this background material that you might find interesting. And, speaking of this, history teachers should particularly appreciate this well-made film.