10-20 years after Cavalcade

Noël Coward did a lot: acting, singing, and writing plays. Quite a few of his plays have been turned into movies; one that I hadn't seen until now is This Happy Breed.

Frank Gibbons (Robert Newton) is the patriarch of a middle-class British family with a wife Ethel (Celia Johnson) and three adolescent children -- at least, they're adolescents at the start of the movie. The movie begins in 1919, just after Frank has returned from fighting in the Great War, and he wants to start life anew, which is why he's taken a nicer townhouse in one of the leafier districts of London.

On arriving at the new house, Frank discovers that his next door neighbor is somebody he knew vaguely during the war, Bob Mitchell (Stanley Holloway). Bob has a son Billy (John Mills) who's going to become a sailor and who falls in love with the eldest Gibbons daughter Queenine (Kay Walsh) once she grows up, although she doesn't realize that Billy is right for her, probably because being married to a sailor isn't easy. Just ask Brandy in that old 1970s song.

Anyhow, after the brief introduction in 1919, the movie moves forward to various points over the next 20 years, many of which would be well-knowon to students of British history (and certainly British audiences of 1944 when the movie was released). There's things like the 1926 general strike; references to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin; and the death of King George V; although somewhat surprisingly, Edward VIII and his abdication wasn't a big deal.

There's also various cultural phenomena such as the radio and the advent of talking pictures, including a scene of a couple of characters watching The Broadway Melody which made me wonder who in Britain held the rights to the movie at the time and if there was an issue with that scene when the movie made it across the Atlantic. (IMDb says the movie didn't get released in the US until 1947, although I'd bet that has more to do with World War II and its aftermath than the presence of the clip from The Broadway Melody.)

Along the way, the family goes through various troubles, the two biggest being the death of the son in a car cash, and Queenie's affair with a married man, which causes Mom to disown her. Eventually, the movie makes its way to 1939 and the start of World War II, which seems a fitting place to conclude the movie.

As I was watching This Happy Breed, I couldn't help but think about the comments I made regarding First Lady a few weeks back. It's material that seems like it would play really well on the stage, especially with a large live audience. On the screen, however, it felt to me as though something was missing. On the other hand, the movie was made in Technicolor, which must have been a difficult feat in the UK at the height of the war. It's physically beautiful to look at.

On the whole, I'd give a positive recommendation to This Happy Breed, especially if you're an Anglophile. It's not quite as good as some of the other movies based on Noël Coward works, but it's definitely worth a watch.