April 16: This Happy Breed (1944 -- David Lean)

★★★★

No sophomore slump here.  David Lean’s second collaboration with Noel Coward (and Ronald Neame) again pairs good character study with the cinematic to describe bedrock England.  This Happy Breed follows a middle class family though the two decades between WW I and WW II, showing the domestic values that underlie what is quintessentially English and the factors that stress them.

A lot of the characters in This Happy Breed recall those from In Which We Serve, and when the characters don’t obviously correspond, their qualities look familiar.  From the film’s opening panorama of London that slowly zooms in on a middle class neighborhood with gardens uniformly filling each identical back yard, the British affection for horticulture almost becomes a metaphor for the British character.  “We do things slow in this country,” Frank tells the impetuous leftist Sam, who will later become his stolidly middle-class son-in-law.  Steady, calm, and methodical with an eye to the future, -- these are the qualities of a good gardener and a good Brit.  Like the Chief of In Which We Serve, Frank tends his garden and his family conservatively, adjusting to whatever immediate crises arise so that he can get back to his happy equilibrium.

But This Happy Breed shows us that the British conservative isn't rigid because the British heart prods the conservative to adapt.  Ethel shows this dynamic the most clearly when she rejects her daughter Queenie because of the girl’s socially shameful behavior and her undermining the marriage of another woman.  Celia Johnson’s hardworking, determined Ethel vows never to speak to her daughter again for these social transgressions, but when the occasion for their reunion comes, the mother’s heart can’t hold out against her conservative values, and mother and daughter are reunited.  There’s a similar reunion between Queenie and Billy, the very decent suitor she has previously rejected as boring.  Billy has been diligently working his way up the ranks to be able to afford marriage while Vi has been learning that red dresses and the Charleston aren't what she really wants.  After their divergent paths, the two are able to embrace middle class, married bliss by the time the film ends.

There are other echoes of In Which We Serve in this film, too.  We again have an crabby, elderly, female in-law residing in the house, Ethel’s mother, and she’s continually bickering with a younger woman, Ethel’s sister Sylvia.  And the stolid middle class life in this film is punctuated by the same events as the middle class life In Which We Serve, a wedding and a Christmas celebration with paper decorations.  Both of these two Lean/Coward collaborations show the British middle class as stolid but open to change as compelling family needs dictate.

This Happy Breed doesn't have the sudden cinematic flourishes like the opening of In Which We Serve or the editing dazzle we see in some scenes in that film, but there are moments of cinematic pleasure here.  The opening with the London cityscape that ends in the garden of a single home has its thrill while it's also telling us that we’re seeing the story of but one little family among many.  And without a line that says, “This is the story of a family.”  Lean, and perhaps Coward, trust cinema enough at this point that they don't need expository dialog.  Another scene adapts theater technique to the screen.  The scene opens with Ethel’s mother and Sylvia listening to some upbeat jazz when they are interrupted by Vi with the bad news of Reg's death.  The peppy music continues unabated on the soundtrack while the two burst into tears and flee the room, creating an ironic emotional counterpoint.  The music continues while Vi goes to the garden to tell Frank and Ethel of their loss, but the camera stays in the room, motionless as always, with the jazz going.  Frank and Ethel reenter the room some moments later, clearly devastated, but the music continues at the same volume and the camera continues its static gaze.  It’s not hard to see this exact staging in a theatrical production, but it works well on film, too.

The cinematography makes the boldest film statement of This Happy Breed.  We know it’s Technicolor from the credits and from more traditional uses of the process like we see in the ranks of brightly dressed soldiers marching in the parade with red accents on their uniforms.  But most of the film uses Technicolor in an unusual way to create rich, muted brown and grey hues, from the drab wallpaper to the drab upholstery to the drab clothes.  The film can show color --  it does so in the Christmas decorations and in Queenie’s dance sequence – but Technicolor here only reinforces the drabness of the family’s environment, which is an appropriate corollary to the family’s conservative values.  There’s nothing too extravagant in behavior, values or décor with this middle class, British family.

This Happy Breed is a solid film that gives an insightful reading of bedrock British values.  Because of the film’s clear sympathy with the characters it portrays, it doesn't idealize, patronize or satirize.  By staying in the realm of drama as much as it does, This Happy Breed gives us a perspective on a certain segment of British society between the two wars.