This Happy Breed (1944)
Directed by David Lean

Film Review

After his first successful collaboration with David Lean on the wartime drama In Which We Serve (1942), Noël Coward allowed Lean to direct single-handedly another of his stage plays, This Happy Breed.  It was a good partnership, and Coward and Lean would work together on a further two films, Blithe Spirit (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945).

This Happy Breed has some similarities with an earlier Coward play, Cavalcade, which was adapted as a film by Frank Lloyd in 1933.  Just as Cavalcade chronicles the fortunes of an upper class family in the early 1900s, so This Happy Breed provides an intimate portrait of an ordinary lower middle class family living in London between the wars.  The film also draws in the social, political and technological changes that occurred over this period and is as much a document of social history as it is a domestic film drama.

Significantly, This Happy Breed was one of the earliest full-length British films to be shot entirely in colour.  At the time, colour recording equipment and colour film were extraordinarily difficult to get hold of, although the film's propaganda value presumably facilitated this.  The film's title comes from the famous John of Gaunt speech from Act II, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's Richard II, one of the most patriotic pieces of text in the English language.

The film's cast is indeed a happy breed and includes some very distinguished actors, most of whom would take leading roles in subsequent David Lean films:  John Mills in Great Expectations (1946), Robert Newton in Oliver Twist (1948) and Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter (1945).  Lean's wife at the time, Kay Walsh, plays the part of Queenie Gibbons; she had previously appeared in In Which We Serve (1942).

Whilst it is too easy today to dismiss This Happy Breed as a blatant piece of wartime propaganda, the film does have great artistic merit and was a huge success when it was first released in 1944.  If you can overlook Coward's slightly patrician tone, some awful plot contrivances and the fact that many of the characters are somewhat caricatured, the film does have great charm and some moments of genuine poignancy.  

The performances are excellent - particularly Newton and Johnson - and, along with Lean's meticulous direction, bring real emotional depth to a film that might otherwise have slipped into tedious melodrama.  The early colour photography also adds to the film's appeal.  Lacking the tonal variation and sharpness of modern colour, this gives the film a very distinctive atmosphere, evoking a strange mix of nostalgia and realism, quite unlike anything else in cinema.

Film Synopsis

1919.  In the aftermath of WWI, Number 17 Sycamore Road, Clapham, London acquires a new set of residents.  The recently demobbed Frank Gibbons moves in with his wife Ethel, his three children, his sister Sylvia and his mother-in-law Mrs Flint.  Over the course of the next twenty years, Mr and Mrs Gibbons live a contented but uneventful life, as their children grow up and leave home, and the world around them changes beyond recognition...