This Happy Breed

David Lean's first colour film, and the first on which he was credited as sole director. It was his second collaboration with Noël Coward, from Coward's play. The subject is a family and a house. The Gibbonses move into a house in Clapham at the end of the First World War, and the film watches them in that same house for twenty years, up to the start of the Second. The great events of history stay outside; inside there are births, arguments, marriages, deaths and evening meals. The camera almost never leaves the building. Robert Newton and Celia Johnson play the husband and wife. Ronald Neame shot it in Technicolor, and the colour is used not for display but for the texture of ordinary life. John Mills, Stanley Holloway and Kay Walsh are also in the cast. It struck a direct nerve in a war-weary Britain and was the box-office hit of 1944. Who it is for: viewers who like calm British drama about how ordinary life changes across a long stretch of time. Who it is not for: anyone wanting incident. There is no single big scene, and the wartime patriotism is plainly audible in places.