A wealthy public schoolboy was asked by his English teacher to write an essay on the subject of "Poverty". He began his essay thus. "There once was a poor family. The father was poor. The mother was poor. The children were poor. Even the servants were poor".
Seeing "This Happy Breed", which tells the story of a working class London family between 1919 and 1939, put me in mind of this old joke. You can tell the family are supposed to be working class as they all talk in not-always-accurate Cockney accents, but given that they live in a solid Edwardian villa in the prosperous South London commuter suburb of Clapham, the sort of house which today would sell for over half a million pounds, and even employ their own live-in maid, they are not the sort of people whom anyone other than Noël Coward would regard as belonging to the downtrodden masses.
Apart from Edie the maid, the household includes paterfamilias Frank Gibbons, his wife Ethel, their three children Reg, Vi and Queenie, Frank's widowed sister Sylvia and Ethel's elderly mother. Another important character is their neighbour, Frank's old army friend Bob Mitchell, whose sailor son Billy falls in love with Queenie. We follow the story of the Gibbonses between the wars, with occasional reference to political events (the Empire Exhibition of 1924, the General Strike of 1926, the rise of Nazism, etc).
Although the film was made in 1944 during the war, the play upon which it is based had been written in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, and it ends with Frank and Ethel's retirement to the countryside. Rather surprisingly, there is no attempt to turn Coward's play into a piece of direct wartime propaganda by changing the ending to show the Gibbonses staying in London throughout the Blitz. (The nearest to a direct reference to the war comes in a scene set in 1938 when Frank criticises Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, and the pro-appeasement, anti-war ideas which Coward despised are discredited by being put into the mouth of the eccentric Sylvia, a hypochondriac and religious fanatic). Rather, the filmmakers use the story to put across an indirect propaganda message, showing the supposed courage, determination and good humour of ordinary British people, albeit not in a wartime setting. The title, a reference to the English people, is taken from John of Gaunt's famous patriotic speech in Shakespeare's "Richard II".
The film was, rather unnecessarily, made in colour. Technicolor film was something of a luxury in the wartime British cinema, generally reserved for spectaculars like Olivier's "Henry V", so I was surprised to see it being used for a low-key domestic drama. The film would have worked just as well in black-and-white, a medium in which its director David Lean could work brilliantly. There are no bright colours; most scenes are of domestic interiors, decorated in the drab brown-and-cream colour schemes of the twenties and thirties.
This was Lean's second film as director; all his first four were based upon works by Coward. (The others were "In Which We Serve", "Blithe Spirit" and "Brief Encounter"). Lean is today probably best remembered for large-scale epics like "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Dr Zhivago", but his early work from the 1940s is very different in style, being made in a much more intimate, small-scale manner. Lean could be a master of this style; indeed, I would rate his two Dickens adaptations of "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations" as being among his greatest works.
"This Happy Breed", however, is one of Lean's weakest films. Its weakness is only partly due to Coward's patronising and unrealistic view of the man or woman on the Clapham omnibus. (He was much more effective when writing about the aristocracy or wealthy classes). The acting is not particularly good, despite the presence of well-known names such Robert Newton as Frank, Celia Johnson as Ethel and John Mills as Billy. Mills, at 36, seems far too old for the youthful Billy of the early scenes; as often happens with family sagas, dealing with characters who start off young and end up middle-aged proves to be a problem. Guy Verney, who plays Vi's Socialist husband Sam Leadbitter, struck me as being particularly poor. His Cockney accent was the least convincing on display, and although Sam is supposed to be a revolutionary firebrand his political speeches are delivered in a wooden manner. Things could have been worse; Coward apparently wanted to play Frank himself, as he had done on stage, but was dissuaded by Lean who felt (probably correctly) that audiences would be unable to accept the patrician author as a working-class character.
The other problem with the film is its disjointed, episodic structure. I do not know how this would work on stage, as I have never seen the play in the theatre. (It is rarely performed nowadays). On screen, however, it has the effect of turning the story into a series of vignettes, meaning that there is no real sense of character development and that potentially interesting themes are wasted without their full dramatic potential being realised. An example is Queenie's affair with a married man, which is dealt with in a very perfunctory manner; we never see her lover on screen, and never even learn his name. In 1944 a film like this might have had a certain appeal, if only for its feelgood factor. Today it comes across as very dated. 5/10
Some goofs. Given that the film was made only a few years after the events is depicts, I was surprised to come across a couple of historical errors. In reality, the formation of Britain's National Government (1931) took place before Adolf Hitler's election as German chancellor (1933), not after it as shown here, and the full name of Oswald Mosley's movement was the "British Union of Fascists", not the "Fascist Party of Great Britain".
Seeing "This Happy Breed", which tells the story of a working class London family between 1919 and 1939, put me in mind of this old joke. You can tell the family are supposed to be working class as they all talk in not-always-accurate Cockney accents, but given that they live in a solid Edwardian villa in the prosperous South London commuter suburb of Clapham, the sort of house which today would sell for over half a million pounds, and even employ their own live-in maid, they are not the sort of people whom anyone other than Noël Coward would regard as belonging to the downtrodden masses.
Apart from Edie the maid, the household includes paterfamilias Frank Gibbons, his wife Ethel, their three children Reg, Vi and Queenie, Frank's widowed sister Sylvia and Ethel's elderly mother. Another important character is their neighbour, Frank's old army friend Bob Mitchell, whose sailor son Billy falls in love with Queenie. We follow the story of the Gibbonses between the wars, with occasional reference to political events (the Empire Exhibition of 1924, the General Strike of 1926, the rise of Nazism, etc).
Although the film was made in 1944 during the war, the play upon which it is based had been written in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, and it ends with Frank and Ethel's retirement to the countryside. Rather surprisingly, there is no attempt to turn Coward's play into a piece of direct wartime propaganda by changing the ending to show the Gibbonses staying in London throughout the Blitz. (The nearest to a direct reference to the war comes in a scene set in 1938 when Frank criticises Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, and the pro-appeasement, anti-war ideas which Coward despised are discredited by being put into the mouth of the eccentric Sylvia, a hypochondriac and religious fanatic). Rather, the filmmakers use the story to put across an indirect propaganda message, showing the supposed courage, determination and good humour of ordinary British people, albeit not in a wartime setting. The title, a reference to the English people, is taken from John of Gaunt's famous patriotic speech in Shakespeare's "Richard II".
The film was, rather unnecessarily, made in colour. Technicolor film was something of a luxury in the wartime British cinema, generally reserved for spectaculars like Olivier's "Henry V", so I was surprised to see it being used for a low-key domestic drama. The film would have worked just as well in black-and-white, a medium in which its director David Lean could work brilliantly. There are no bright colours; most scenes are of domestic interiors, decorated in the drab brown-and-cream colour schemes of the twenties and thirties.
This was Lean's second film as director; all his first four were based upon works by Coward. (The others were "In Which We Serve", "Blithe Spirit" and "Brief Encounter"). Lean is today probably best remembered for large-scale epics like "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Dr Zhivago", but his early work from the 1940s is very different in style, being made in a much more intimate, small-scale manner. Lean could be a master of this style; indeed, I would rate his two Dickens adaptations of "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations" as being among his greatest works.
"This Happy Breed", however, is one of Lean's weakest films. Its weakness is only partly due to Coward's patronising and unrealistic view of the man or woman on the Clapham omnibus. (He was much more effective when writing about the aristocracy or wealthy classes). The acting is not particularly good, despite the presence of well-known names such Robert Newton as Frank, Celia Johnson as Ethel and John Mills as Billy. Mills, at 36, seems far too old for the youthful Billy of the early scenes; as often happens with family sagas, dealing with characters who start off young and end up middle-aged proves to be a problem. Guy Verney, who plays Vi's Socialist husband Sam Leadbitter, struck me as being particularly poor. His Cockney accent was the least convincing on display, and although Sam is supposed to be a revolutionary firebrand his political speeches are delivered in a wooden manner. Things could have been worse; Coward apparently wanted to play Frank himself, as he had done on stage, but was dissuaded by Lean who felt (probably correctly) that audiences would be unable to accept the patrician author as a working-class character.
The other problem with the film is its disjointed, episodic structure. I do not know how this would work on stage, as I have never seen the play in the theatre. (It is rarely performed nowadays). On screen, however, it has the effect of turning the story into a series of vignettes, meaning that there is no real sense of character development and that potentially interesting themes are wasted without their full dramatic potential being realised. An example is Queenie's affair with a married man, which is dealt with in a very perfunctory manner; we never see her lover on screen, and never even learn his name. In 1944 a film like this might have had a certain appeal, if only for its feelgood factor. Today it comes across as very dated. 5/10
Some goofs. Given that the film was made only a few years after the events is depicts, I was surprised to come across a couple of historical errors. In reality, the formation of Britain's National Government (1931) took place before Adolf Hitler's election as German chancellor (1933), not after it as shown here, and the full name of Oswald Mosley's movement was the "British Union of Fascists", not the "Fascist Party of Great Britain".