This Happy Breed

Robert Newton - Frank Gibbons
Celia Johnson - Ethel Gibbons
John Mills - Billy Mitchell
Kay Walsh - Queenie Gibbons
Stanley Holloway - Bob Mitchell
Amy Veness - Mrs. Flint
Alison Leggatt - Aunt Sylvia
John Blythe - Reg

This Happy Breed might be called a semi-sequel to Noel Coward's classic play Cavalcade. It spans the subsequent two decades from 1919 to 1939, while concentrating again on the personal history of an English family. It proceeds to pick out the nine key scenes, the climactic or transcendent moments of a half-dozen lives. Specifically to the domestic scenes of the Hardys and the Blakes.

The inhabitants of Number Seventeen Sycamore Road, Clapham Common are much the same people, with their irritable in-laws, their just-plain-folks camaraderie, and their unshakeable belief that no matter how hard the times Mother England is forged of good stock and common sense will somehow prevail. "The people themselves, the ordinary people like you and me," Frank Gibbons tells his infant grandson, "we know what we belong to, where we come from, and where we're going. We may not know it with our brains, but we know it with our roots." However, the middle-class, ostensibly "democratic" cast members of This Happy Breed do not really follow in the bourgeois, Victorian, support-the-empire traditions of Cavalcade, but the basic portrayal is a sympathetic one. Unlike Cavalcade, This Happy Breed ended on a roughly contemporary date.

The results in This Happy Breed are not wholly satisfactory. The film itself emerges as episodic without effect, calculatedly detailed under a semblance of accidental observation, a narrative of fits and starts as characters try to become people, and people never succeeded in becoming characters.