This Happy Breed (UK 1944)

This Happy Breed (UK 1944)
Directed by David Lean, based on a play by Noël Coward
cast: Robert Newton (Frank Gibbons), Celia Johnson (Ethel Gibbons), John Mills (Billy Mitchell), Kay Walsh (Queenie), Stanley Holloway (Bob Mitchell), Amy Veness (Mrs. Flint), Alison Leggatt (Aunt Sylvia) and others.

“This Happy Breed,” a creative adaptation of Noël Coward's play about the Gibbon family, became the most popular British film of 1944, drawing on the screen an allegory of Britain's national identity. The resonance of the film was evidenced by rumors - female word of mouth spreading his fame and heaps of letters from viewers to the creators of the film. The audience saw on the screen “real England”. The portrait of a steadfast family raised morale and rose to the rank of a positive role model within the civilian war ethos. “This Lucky Breed” follows the fortunes of a petty-bourgeois Gibbon family from their home at 17 Sycamore Road in Clapham. The film uses the house as a microcosm of the nation, and the compositional buckle is the move—at the beginning and at the end. The picture emphasizes the continuity and repeatability of the state and behavior of the community. Frank and Bob come out of the war unscathed, which helped keep morale up. The family under number 17 embodies the milestones and historically significant events of the nation, and the apocalyptic staging of turbulent history is replaced here by steadfast patriotism. Ronald Neame's camera wanders from the London skyline to the Gibbons' home in Clapham, visualizing the ordinariness in subdued colours. “This Happy Breed” rejects politics: for example, the 1926 general strike is portrayed as a trauma, while Frank and Bob's work as bus drivers — as an attitude worthy of support. Sam's socialism is ridiculed. Political hysteria, including the enthusiastic reception of Chamberlain and the unhealthy fascination with fascism of the British, are also subject to criticism. The Gibbon family's domestic stillness expresses the conservative inertia of the nation. Frank's garden metaphor defends evolutionary, gradual change against rapid change, and he sees the sources of unhappiness in hot human nature. The film's “This Happy Breed” ends with Frank and Ethel's touching banter and his tender confession — “I don't care how many apartments we move to, or where we go, or what we'll do if I had you by my side” — and her mild rebuke — “Don't talk nonsense.” The final shots reverse the beginning of the film — moving out of an empty house and the Gibbons moving away from London as a small but symbolically significant piece of identity. The finale features Coward's song “London Pride”, highlighting the playwright's signature stamp over the film. It is therefore theatre within cinema, but the creative contribution of director David Lean, praised by the critic Richard Winnington, was increasingly seen as a film: “confirmation and hope for those who believe in British cinema”.

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