POWER & PREJUDICE (I)
THIS HAPPY BREED & BANK HOLIDAY
As the British people picked up the pieces of their lives in the years immediately following the Second World War, so the movies they went to see began to reflect the social attitudes, struggles and problems that ordinary people had to deal with in their austere ration‑book existence.
A new Labour government was in power, and the country’s population looked to it for signs of dramatic improvement. Two World Wars, a General Strike, low wages, unemployment, inadequate housing and food shortages had left the people reeling. Coupled with the acquired knowledge that in America, our ‘cousins’ appeared to live a life of endless money and opportunity.
So, in an atmosphere of uneasy expectancy, Britain sought to rebuild itself. This Happy Breed (1944) was one of the first British films to have an ‘epic’ feel. Although essentially a focused saga of one family, it spans twenty years and three generations, and is representative of the turmoil of the nation. From the viewpoint of the Gibbons household, we see the upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s, the General Strike, the Depression, the death of George V, plus the growing dissatisfaction of youth and the craving for something more. The film is based on Noel Coward’s play and is remarkably faithful, mostly preferring to stay inside the Gibbons house and tell the story through the emotional responses of the characters as each event occurs and as it affects their daily routine and lives.
Frank Gibbons (Robert Newton) returns home after the amnesty of 1918 and settles with his wife and children in Clapham, a suburb of London. As their daughters reach adulthood, one of them, Queenie (Kay Walsh) runs away from home with a married man. At the time, the idea, never mind the reality, of a young daughter having an affair with a married man was deeply shocking. To see the effect this incident has on the household is both a surprise for the modern viewer and enormously moving. Her mother Ethel (Celia Johnson), literally disowns her, while Frank is left in despair at losing his daughter and the realization his wife has rejected her for such as unforgivable sin.
C.A. Lejeune, the respected film critic at the time writing for the Observer, noted that Noel Coward, who cared more about the Navy’s opinion of In Which We Serve (1942) than the critics’ approval, must have felt a glow of satisfaction over the release of This Happy Breed, for this film about the suburbs had gone out into the suburbs, and they had taken it to their hearts. All the Gibbonses of Greater London flocked to see themselves on the screen. People in fish queues, fruit queues, bus queues, and queues for queues, passed the word to each other over their baskets. They were amused, touched, entertained and edified all at once. It went straight to their address. The whole is an essential ‘photo’ for John Bull’s family album.
In the story, Queenie’s whirlwind of escape, of romance and prosperity, is brought to an end in Marseilles when her lover leaves and where the young sailor who lives next door (and has always loved her) finds her broken-hearted but manages to bring her home. Although she’s not outwardly grateful, it may be that she loves the young sailor (John Mills), but he’s still poor, working‑class and ‘ordinary’. Meanwhile, Frank and Ethel’s other children, Vi and Reg, became entangled with a young socialist and the family is further fractured. Soon there are grandchildren, born as the shadow of the second World War looms.
This Happy Breed was the first solo directorial effort of David Lean, who went on to become one of Britain’s most influential and internationally respected directors, best known to world cinema for his series of epics in the 1950s and 1960s, including The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957), Lawrence Of Arabia (1962) and Dr Zhivago (1965), classic examples of Lean’s later cinema efforts. His impact on future generations of film‑makers was keenly felt. Steven Spielberg claims that Lean’s films so excited him as a teenager that he spent hours in his bedroom trying to re‑create them with his 8mm home movie camera. In fact, The Colour Purple (1985) demonstrates Spielberg’s love for Lean’s style, paying direct homage to Dr Zhivago, a movie where the central characters often view their world through frosted, iced or rain‑splattered windows. This is a recurring motif in Lean’s art and early in This Happy Breed there is a particularly immersive shot, as the camera pans across the rooftops of rows and rows of terraced houses before finally entering the new Gibbons house through a rear window. Continuing to move, the camera cranes across the landing and all the way down the stairs. It finally reaches the front door, just as it opens and the family enters.
Although This Happy Breed can be historically superficial and trivializes important issues of the day, it handles sentiment well, which of course is Noel Coward’s trademark. The performances are particularly convincing, especially from Robert Newton and Celia Johnson, who make you feel their anguish as parents trying to protect children from destructive elements. And above all there is David Lean, whose fusing of emotion and technique works superbly, especially in the scene where Vi (the eldest daughter) has to tell mum and dad that Reg has been killed in a car crash. They are in the garden and Vi hesitates in the dining room, before plucking up the nerve to move outside. Yet we remain in the empty room and we wait, curious but afraid, until after a long pause, Ethel enters followed by Frank. It is only as they sit that Lean cuts to Frank gently placing his hand on his wife’s hand. Then we back away - and the screen fades to black. Lean was greatly helped by cameraman Ronald Neame’s lush colour photography, and together they created in This Happy Breed a visual hymn to the working class ethos which also contributed to the film industry’s advance to a new social realism.
Another British director of enormous talent and influence, with a penchant for socially progressive films, was at this time honing his skills and preparing to deliver three of cinema’s finest. Carol Reed (who was knighted in 1952) had been directing since the early 1930s but came to the attention of filmgoers in 1938 with the release of his quite controversial Bank Holiday. The film was constructed on the ‘Grand Hotel’ principle, where a number of characters with different stories are woven in and out of an episodic plot. The principle character we follow is young nurse Catherine (Margaret Lockwood), who has a boyfriend, Geoffrey (Hugh Williams), with whom she is intending to spend an illicit weekend in a plush seaside hotel. However, this is made trickier by her becoming emotionally involved with a young man at the hospital, whose wife has just died in childbirth.
Of course, in 1938, the idea of an unmarried couple spending time in a hotel double bedroom was pretty hair‑raising. But puritans needn’t have worried, since the issue is fudged in particularly innocuous fashion, as the boyfriend, overcome by nerves, botches the booking horribly. His inquiries ‑ such as ‘Does the 18/6d price include breakfast?’ – are smoothly glossed over by an over‑polite clerk, who kindly diffuses embarrassment by informing the nervous couple that, as far as doubles are concerned, there’s no room at the inn.
Bank Holiday begins with masses of people knocking off work and joining long queues at Victoria Station. Regardless of occupation, it appears that everyone is going to get away from it all. The attitude is carefree. But the man who waits alone at the hospital, Stephen Howard (John Lodge), is suffering anguish that no holiday can cure. His emotional, and subsequently physical, isolation dominates the film. It’s this character that interests Reed most and is the forerunner of the obsessive loners who will figure in his later films. However, the doom-laden aspects of Bank Holiday are lightened by some comic moments, featuring Wally Patch and Kathleen Harrison as a typical air of cockneys with a barrel-load of kids causing mayhem and getting lost.
The film really comes to life in crowd scenes. Reed shows real skill at alternately integrating with, or isolating against, the packed crowds those characters who are most relevant to his plot. It is, as C.A. Lejeune wrote at the time, an improbable story which has been given through the truth of its detail, an air of almost indisputable authenticity. The film had its share of controversy too, over a scene where Margaret Lockwood tries to commit suicide by putting her head in a gas oven. Frank Launder, the producer, remembers that the censor said that he couldn’t pass this, and showed him a letter had received years earlier from the Gas, Light & Coke Company as it was then, protesting about an incident in an Alfred Hitchcock film where the heroine had attempted suicide by a similar means. The Gas Company complained that, when the film went on release in Britain, numbers of ‘love-lorn maidens’ had started putting their heads in gas ovens. This was a worrying problem, because it meant that people were changing to electricity!
In its way, Bank Holiday is an important British film and it’s been compared to early Hitchcock. In particular, it’s not afraid to be experimental in its use of flashbacks (uncommon at the time) and to mix locations and studio shoots.
ODD MAN OUT, WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS & GOOD TIME GIRL