This Happy Breed (1944 David Lean)

"It's only the poor old Johnny Walker!"

Why do we love THIS HAPPY BREED so much - it's one of our absolute favourites. It seems unfairly neglected compared to Lean's other great early films In Which We Serve, Brief Encounter, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Made during the war but looking at a family between 1919 and 1939, and for that reason with a profound historical shadow (dramatic irony) hanging over it. It is funny without being witty, as that wouldn't befit the characters; it's political, allowing meditation on movements and what it means to be British; written and acted with a great deal of warmth but no sentimentality; brilliantly cinematic.

It's a bit like a Mike Leigh, with its study of family interactions and episodic explosions, and it's also quite elliptical (for example, Vi telling Sam she never wants to see him again: the next shot but one is their wedding). Interestingly we watched it once (Sunday May 20 2012 - it's the archetypal Sunday afternoon film, after all) back to back with Leigh's All Or Nothing and the difference between the two families / eras was monumental. Try it!

Produced by Noel Coward and based on his play, the screenplay is by Anthony Havelock-Allen, David Lean and Ronald Neame, who also photographed it in then precious Technicolor, and who despite his doctor's warnings about drinking too much outlived him to the age of 99. The colour though is as drab as the wallpaper (apparently sprayed with grey paint), which yes, has been repapered throughout the family's 20 year lease.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Robert Newton (although he was contractually banned from drinking during the filming, there's a great funny story about this told in John Mills' autobiography Up in the Clouds, Gentlemen Please!) and Celia Johnson are the parents, Amy Veness the mother (Mrs Flint) and Alison Leggatt (Sylv) the sister-in-law (the spat these two have before Reg's wedding is wildly funny). The next door neighbour is of course Stanley Holloway (it's no coincidence this gentleman is in several of my favourite films), and we never see his ailing wife. The kids are played by Kay Walsh (Queenie), then Lean's wife in possibly her best performance, loved by sailor Johnny Mills, and Eileen Erskine (Vi) and John Blythe (Reg); friends are Guy Verney (Sam Lidbetter) and Betty Fleetwood (Phyl); and Merle Tottenham is the indefatiguable help, Edie.

Everyone's great but it took me a while to get how good Kay Walsh is in this - she has a perfect combination of alacrity, petulant hostility and vulnerability. Her return home is one of the weepiest moments in cinema.

Guy Green, who went on to become a great cameraman (winning an Oscar for Great Expectations) and director, is the one actually moving the camera around the deserted house. And the scene where Vi announces the death, so perfectly contrasted against the jolly music on the radio, uses the camera expertly as it first moves across the room, then away from the devastated parents (that they say nothing makes it even more powerful). Lean was certainly as interesting a director as Powell & Pressburger. For example we also love the way the voices are all reverbed when they move into the empty house.

Location filming was at Alderbook Road, Clapham - you can see how little changed it is - except for the vast quantity of cars! - at http://www.reelstreets.com/films/this-happy-breed/.

There were, by the way, no gas attacks in Britain in WW2, so the gas masks were redundant.

You'd need to be a confident writer-director to make a sequel, perhaps set 1939 - 1969, but where are the Johnny Mills and Stanley Holloway of today?

"You wouldn't put a good word in for me now and then?"

Note: I'm always surprised by the joke Billy tells on Reg's wedding day about the captain giving him the ship. "What'll I do with it? Scuttle her! And he slit his throat from ear to ear!" It's so random I've no idea what it means...