David Lean (1944)

The life of a London family over a period of twenty years – ‘the years of l’entre deux guerres’ – is presented episodically in this adaptation of Noel Coward’s play of the same name.  The screenplay is credited to David Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan.  Coward produced and is believed to have been dissuaded by Lean from recreating his stage role as the paterfamilias, Edward Gibbons:  the director reckoned that, in spite of Coward’s relatively humble origins, his public persona was too posh for cinema audiences to accept him in the part.  Lean was probably right although, even without Coward in the cast of This Happy Breed, the quasi-Cockney accents – as you’d expect in a British film of the time – make the actors playing the lower-middle-class Gibbonses sound as if they’re walking a vocal tightrope.  The picture is of considerable historical interest, as propaganda (it was released in Britain in June 1944) and in its treatment of major cultural and political events of the inter-war years (the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, the General Strike, Hitler’s coming to power, and so on).  But this celebration of the lives and values of ‘ordinary’ Londoners is patronisingly conservative (and Conservative):  Noel Coward’s own life would have been very different if he’d practised what he preaches here and hadn’t acted on ambitions above his social station.

The speeches from Edward Gibbons (Robert Newton) that characterise him as part of the backbone of England are tiresome and sentimental.  Coward’s outlook is politically broad-minded only to the extent that socialism – espoused by Sam Leadbitter (Guy Verney), who becomes the Gibbons’s son-in-law – is presented as an expression of forgivable, foolish idealism that you grow out of, while Tory prime ministers (Stanley Baldwin as well as Neville Chamberlain) are criticised for their policy of appeasement.  Fascism is a bugbear perhaps less per se than because it’s the cause of – and the enemy’s cause in – the current war.  I find the continually scolding manner of the older women in the story lowering rather than amusing, even though Alison Leggatt, as Edward’s spinster (and, in the later stages, spiritualist) sister, creates a vivid, intense portrait of neurotic eccentricity.   The querulousness on the distaff side does work powerfully when news is received of the death, in a car crash, of the Gibbons’s only son (John Blythe) and his very new wife (Betty Fleetwood):  the bickering is instantly, shockingly replaced by real grief.   The camerawork in this sequence might seem clichéd now but it must have been imaginative seventy years ago:  David Lean holds a shot of an open door and, beyond it, the Gibbons’s back garden, as their daughter Vi (Eileen Erskine) goes out to tell her parents about the car accident.   The camera remains stationary as Edward and his wife Ethel (Celia Johnson) receive the world-changing news.  Lean’s book-ending of the story with the family’s arrival at a new home in Clapham in 1919 and departure from it in 1939 is simply effective.  The domestic decor (the art director was C P Norman) is very persuasive.

Edward’s anti-appeasement outburst, as crowds celebrate Chamberlain’s Munich deal in 1938, is Robert Newton’s high point.  Elsewhere, he’s less convincing but not as bad as you might expect because he seems uncertain – to be doing what he thinks he’s meant to do, suppressing his natural tendency to overdo things.   Celia Johnson looks a little young for the role of Ethel yet she’s believably careworn and gives a fine performance:  she varies the pace well and suggests a woman who’s both narrow-minded and deeply committed to doing what she thinks is best for her family.  There’s good work too from Stanley Holloway, as the Gibbons’s neighbour Bob Mitchell, an army comrade of Edward in the Great War; and from John Mills, as Bob’s son, who comes up through the ranks in the Royal Navy and never abandons hope of winning the heart of Queenie (Kay Walsh), the Gibbons’s glamour-hungry (and therefore misguided) other daughter.  Amy Veness is Ethel’s grumpy mother (she lives with her daughter and son-in-law) and Merle Tottenham the Gibbons’s maid.  Although modern audiences would naturally envisage the time and place of the story in black-and-white, This Happy Breed, photographed by Ronald Neame, is in Technicolor.

7 September 2015