Review of This Happy Breed (1944) by Stuart K — 17 Jan 2012

David Lean's second film as director, his first one solo after co-directing In Which We Serve (1942) with Noël Coward, who produced this film, based upon his own play. It's a very good character drama with some fine acting and this was a sign of things to come from director Lean, who went from small dramas to big epics.

Set over a 20 year period in one house in Clapham, South London, it begins in 1919 when the Gibbons family move in, they include father Frank (Robert Newton), his wife Ethel (Celia Johnson), and their children Reg (John Blythe), Vi (Eileen Erskine) and Queenie (Kay Walsh) along with Frank's widowed sister Sylvia (Alison Leggatt) and Ethel's mother (Amy Veness).

From 1919 onwards, they see many big changes in British culture, from the General Strike of 1926 to the rise of Facism across Europe, but how Britain stayed out of it. But the family stay very close, and Frank's neighbour Bob Mitchell (Stanley Holloway ) happens to be an acquaintance from his time in the trenches.

Bob's son Billy (John Mills) falls in love with Queenie, but she turns him down for another man, only to return years later and marry Billy. Sylvia even takes up a spot of spiritualism. It's an engaging soap opera, and Coward has a good ear for dialogue, but some of it does come across as being a little over the top, (some sequences wouldn't look out of place in a Carry On film), but it has a good cast and it put Lean on the map as a good British director, and it is well worth a watch.