Synopsis
This Happy Breed (1944) is a British family chronicle you can watch online on iFILM. Director David Lean adapted Noël Coward's stage play into a Technicolor portrait of one south London family across twenty years — from the armistice of 1919 to the autumn of 1939.
The Gibbons family moves into a terraced house on a Clapham street and moves out again two decades later. In between: the General Strike, the Depression, a daughter's elopement, a son away at sea and Sunday dinners that are almost always the same. Frank Gibbons (Robert Newton) holds the house. His wife Ethel (Celia Johnson) holds the family. Coward wrote them as ordinary people, and Lean shoots them as if ordinary people were worth every frame of Technicolor film.
Celia Johnson would go on to Brief Encounter under Lean's direction the following year, and the emotional restraint she brings to this film already points toward that work. The supporting cast includes John Mills, Stanley Holloway and Laurence Olivier. Watch This Happy Breed (1944) online on iFILM.
Starring
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