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This Happy Breed


 

This Happy Breed was a successful 1944 feature-film adaptation of a popular stage play by Noel Coward. Directed by David Lean as his first major film, the film follows the fortunes of a lower-middle class Gibbons family in the south London suburbs from 1919 to the outbreak World War II. The title is a well-known phrase from Shakespeare, and it describes the English people. It was the most successful cinema film of 1944, and was shot in colour.

Further reading

  • Andrew Higson. "Re-constructing the nation: This Happy Breed, 1944", Film Criticism, Vol.XVI, No's.1-2, 1991-92, pp.95-110.
  • David Ravit. "'Everything in the Garden is Lovely': Male Friendship, the Great War and the British Far Right in Noel Coward's This Happy Breed". (2006, forthcoming).