Movie review - "This Happy Breed" (1944) **

 Amazing to think in wartime they stumped up colour for a domestic drama without much spectacle - but such was the impact of In Which We Serve. Oh there is some spectacle - a fun fair, a parade, some action during the General Strike, walking past the king's coffin - but it's not really needed, it could've been shot cheaply.

I didn't like this. I hated it. I appreciated some of it. The opening shot with the camera panning down. The scene where someone is told of the death of a son and his wife off screen but the camera holds on the garden. (Why not show the accident though?) David Lean was already very confident as a director.

But I couldn't care less about this family. These working class tories who unthinkingly support the establishment. A daughter's boyfriend dares to suggest changes to the status quo, worries about poverty and wages, and is mocked and sorted out. A daughter dares to want to be something more than a boring housewife and mother and is scolded by a horribly oppressive childhood friend (John Mills) who she doesn't like and her own parents, especially her dad, then runs off with a married man, which okay was scandalous, but the parents make it all about them. What a pack of whingers.

I'm sorry their son died and his wife but they sort of die for convenience and it doesn't seem to affect them too much apart from one scene.

Celia Johnson is good as the mother. Robert Newton feels all wrong as the father, as if he's slightly sending it up. Newton seems more interested in his friend Stanley Holloway than his wife, and he seems drunk telling her daughter to give up dreams, and complaining about the British people daring to want peace (you can make a good anti appeasement argument - it's not done here).

John Mills is good even if his character is clearly controlling (the girl never says she loves him and then she later gives their kid to her parents to raise while she goes to Singapore!)

I recognise that people would feel differently if they knew these characters and lived through this period, but I felt they were wankers, and I haven't felt that about other Coward characters.

There's so many scenes where you go "why didn't they dramatise that" - the accident that killed the son, John Mills running into the daughter, John Mills spending time with the daughter.

This film sucked.