This Happy Breed

This Happy Breed is a 1944 British Technicolor drama film directed by David Lean and starring Robert Newton, Celia Johnson, Stanley Holloway and John Mills. The screenplay by Lean (who also made his screenwriting debut), Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame is based on the 1939 play This Happy Breed, by Noël Coward. It tells the story of an inter-war suburban London family, set against the backdrop of what were then recent news events, moving from the postwar era of the 1920s to the inevitability of another war, and the passing of the torch from one generation to the next. Domestic triumphs and tragedies play against such transformative changes as the coming of household radio and talking pictures. The film was not released in the United States until April 1947. Plot Laurence Olivier provides introductory narration over a moving aerial shot of 1919 London: “After four long years of war, the men are coming home. Hundreds and hundreds of houses are becoming homes once more.” The film focuses on the Gibbons family - Frank, his wife Ethel, their three children Reg, Vi and Queenie, his widowed sister Sylvia and Ethel's mother - after they settle in a rented house in South London. Frank is delighted that his next-door neighbour is Bob Mitchell, a friend from army days. Frank finds employment with a travel agency, arranging tours of Western Front battlefields. As the children grow up and the country adapts to peacetime, the family attend the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in 1924. And around Christmas 1925, the family acquire their first crystal radio. During the General Strike of 1926 (in which Frank and Bob volunteer as driver and conductor of a bus), Reg is injured in a brawl. Vi blames Sam, her socialist boyfriend, who had brought her brother to the area. But eventually her anger dissipates and she marries him. In 1928, Queenie wins a Charleston dance contest. In 1929 Sam and Vi attend one of the new talking pictures, The Broadway Melody, at the cinema. News of the electoral rise of the German Nazi Party begins to appear in newspapers. Later, Reg marries his girlfriend Phyl. Bob's son, Billy, who has joined the Royal Navy, proposes to Queenie. She turns him down, electing instead to run off with a married man. Her mother, Ethel, vows never to forgive her.