This Happy Breed is a 1944 British Technicolor drama film directed by David Lean and starring Robert Newton, Celia Johnson, Stanley Holloway and John Mills.

The screenplay by Lean (who also made his screenwriting debut), Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame is based on the 1939 play This Happy Breed, by Noël Coward.

It tells the story of an inter-war suburban London family, set against the backdrop of what were then recent news events, moving from the postwar era of the 1920s to the inevitability of another war, and the passing of the torch from one generation to the next.

As the children grow up and the country adapts to peacetime, the family attend the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in 1924 and acquire their first crystal radio around Christmas 1925.

One night, on coming home from a drunken 1931 regimental reunion, Bob expresses his faith in the League of Nations, scoffing at Frank's concerns about the recent Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

They try to keep quiet but inadvertently wake Ethel, who packs Bob off home and Frank to bed, when she notices a letter left by Queenie, who has run off with the married man.

As time passes, the family mourn the death of Reg and Phyl in a car crash, Ethel's mother dies of pneumonia after infuenza, and Aunt Sylvia discovers spiritualism.

This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

But he was raised in the same working-class environment that's covered in both his play and Lean's picture, and some of his collaborators noted a bit of a mean streak in his writing, even as he sought to celebrate the 'common' Brit.

Lean felt the playwright's public persona of witty sophistication was so far removed from his humble lower class origins that audiences would be unable to accept him as Gibbons, and he initially offered the role to Robert Donat instead.

Lean was contractually required to follow strictly the guidelines proposed by the consultant (Joan Bridge),[8] whose expertise he questioned and who drove him to distraction because of her concentration on the minutest details.

According to Kinematograph Weekly the 'biggest winners' at the box office in 1944 Britain were For Whom the Bell Tolls, This Happy Breed, Song of Bernadette, Going My Way, This Is the Army, Jane Eyre, The Story of Dr Wassell, Cover Girl, White Cliffs of Dover, Sweet Rosie O'Grady and Fanny By Gaslight.

Grandma and maiden Aunt Sylvia are thorns in their patient sides, but even the crotchets of these females would be missed... crises are usually soothed by a cup of hot tea.

And there you are.... Producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, Director David Lean and Ronald Neame, the cameraman... show us a house, a neighborhood and people of a wholly credible sort, and they have drawn from their excellent performers some of the neatest characterizations you'd want to see.

Robert Newton and Celia Johnson (she was in "Brief Encounter," you'll recall) are brilliant as the father and mother—quiet, patient and genuine—while Kay Walsh is shrewd as the way-ward daughter and John Mills is stanch as her earnest beau.

Amy Veness and Alison Leggatt are delicious as Grandma and Aunt Syl,.. (The film) hits precisely the humor, the grief and the monotony of commonplace life.

[3] In a 1944 review, Variety gave This Happy Breed high praise: "Based on Noel Coward's London legit hit, film soundly captures the spirit of the 1920s and 1930s reviving the era of the British general strike, the jazz dress style, the Charleston, and the depression.

[14] Writing for TCM in February 2006, Frank Tatara observes: "Coward follows various members of the Gibbons clan as they pass through a variety of highs and lows that make for an engrossing, if rather contrived War-time soap opera.

Pregnancy, secret affairs, spiritualism, and auto accidents all come into play at one point or another, with the family stoically riding the rough seas of British life.

"[16] Time Out London says, "Though Lean and Coward are less happy here than in the brittle, refined atmosphere of Brief Encounter, their adventurous excursion into suburban Clapham remains endlessly fascinating.