This Happy Breed **** (1944, Robert Newton, Celia Johnson, John Mills, Kay Walsh) Classic Movie Review 1677

Playwright Noel Coward makes a lovely attempt to show how ordinary, salt-of-the-earth English people lived between World War One and World War Two. Director David Lean, who also co-wrote the screenplay with producer Anthony Havelock-Allan and cinematographer Ronald Neame, makes a thoroughly professional job of bringing to the screen in 1944 Noel Coward’s 1939 play about a south London family called the Gibbonses.

Robert Newton and Celia Johnson star as the kindly, well-meaning working class married couple Frank and Ethel Gibbons. They have a son Reg (John Blythe) who is killed and a daughter Queenie (Kay Walsh), who has a fling with a married man but eventually goes for homely neighbour, Billy Mitchell, played by John Mills.

The film’s panorama of English suburban life from 1919 to 1939 is an archetypal Coward mixture of good-natured comedy, sharp wit, glowing nostalgia, heart-tugging sentimentality and wartime, moral-boosting patriotism. It’s a little bit shaky now, but warm, entertaining and full of fascinating, accurate-seeming period detail, and has a beguiling rosy-hued glow of nostalgia hovering over it.

The actors all give highly engaging performances, particularly Newton and Johnson, but also Mills, Walsh and Stanley Holloway as Billy’s dad, Bob Mitchell.

Coward co-produced the film of his play with and Anthony Havelock-Allan, while Neame made an outstanding piece of work of the glorious-looking Technicolor cinematography as well as, unusually for a director of photography, co-writing.

The title refers to the English people in a phrase from John of Gaunt’s monologue in Act II, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s Richard II.

Lean’s fruitful classic partnership with Coward started with In Which We Serve in 1942 and  went on to produce this, Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter. Of the stars in In Which We Serve, Celia Johnson, Kay Walsh and John Mills all memorably appear in This Happy Breed, while Celia Johnson, Everley Gregg and Joyce Carey all memorably re-appear in Brief Encounter, along with Stanley Holloway.

This Happy Breed may be the least of the quartet but it’s still quite special.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1677

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