The Happy Family is a 1952 British comedy film directed by Muriel Box and starring Stanley Holloway, Kathleen Harrison and Naunton Wayne.

[2] In 1951, the House of Lords is a grocery shop that sits on the South Bank of the river Thames close to the site of Festival Hall, which is noisily under construction.

He is looking forward to enjoying a quiet retirement at the family shop, looking after his pet hare, Winston, though his spiritualist sister-in-law Ada has had supernatural visions of "men in black" bringing discord.

However, the Lords are reluctant to leave their house, with Henry demanding £6 million if he is to move; an amount he calculates by Mr Filch's account of the estimate of the monetary value the Festival of Britain will bring.

Filch has underestimated how attached they are to their property, which is a symbol of security and family to them after their years of hardship during the Great Depression and the Second World War, where they lost a son.

Just as they are about to give in, Filch arrives and announces that, following the personal intervention of the Prime Minister, the architects have redrawn their plans and the road will now go either side of the shop, thereby saving it from demolition.

[4] In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther called the film "minor whimsy...penned by that usually clever couple, Muriel and Sydney Box, and played by a cast of character actors who are among the best in the land...But the farce collapses painfully upon them long before the end, and what humor there is sounds so parochial that it belongs in earshot of Waterloo Road or, at most, beyond the range of the clumsily and tediously ridiculed BBC" [5] whereas, in a later review in the Radio Times, Sue Heal described the film as "an innocent, gentle lark, harking back to an infinitely preferable if somewhat mythically rosy era when officialdom was bumptious but owlishly benign, and the "Great Unwashed" behaved like a troupe of good-hearted medieval tumblers.