Noel Coward is rightly remembered today for his glittering personality, the odd sparkling play, the crazy audacity of Brief Encounter, and an imperishable song repertoire, which navigated the comic and melancholy with something approaching genius.
But in his day, he was more celebrated for pompous pageants like this, which elevated British ordinariness, mediocrity and respectability, patronisingly epitomised by the lower middle classes. Utilising a framework of great events to focus on the domestic realm is a worthy project, but Coward rejects the critical apparatus of the great film melodramatists. Extremes have no place in these works, and it is extremes - tragedy, pain, madness, fear, humiliation etc. - which are often the essence of great cinema.
One should expect parochial conservatism, cheap patriotism verging on xenophobia (it is hard to credit the jingoism of a man who escaped to the Caribbean to avoid taxes), mundane truisms, contrived vignettes, patronising accents, stilted dialogue, and embarrassingly theatrical acting from Coward in 'serious' mode. But what of David Lean, an artist whose great theme was the breaking out of convention, society, history, mediocrity, and the embracing, however self-destructive, of passion, love, greatness, individuality? Lean has been damning of the sterile Little England mentality, which strives so hard to be normal that it borders on the insane, as in the famous case of Colonel Nicholson in Bridge On The River Kwai. How does this Lean transcend the dullness of his material?
With great difficulty. One divines his desire to follow Queenie, the wayward daughter, who spurns the stifling nature of conventionality, and flees. However, he is stuck within the stagy confines of the good old home, discreetly emphasising its slow-burning repressiveness with a rudimentary use of the techniques Sirk, Ray etc. would later master in evoking confinement and waste. The characters are too stereotypical or complacent to care about, the blatant ideology is offensive, and the colour is ugly; but there is one remarkable sequence, one of the greatest in all cinema, when a death is announced, and Lean reveals, through camera movement alone, the poverty of Coward's vision.
This house is seen by both Coward and Lean as a symbol of Britain, but in different ways - for the one it is faded, but sturdy and reliable; for the other, it is a prison to escape. Thus the double-edged poignancy of the closing 'London Pride' depends on which view you sympathise with, although, either way, the film ends with a brave lack of certainty (it was filmed during the height of the Second World War).
It should be remembered that the film is contemporaneous with, and covers the same period as, Brideshead Revisited; and the comparison with Waugh only shows up Coward's inadequacies in terms of artistic width, human understanding, and historical acuity (whatever Waugh's defects as a human being). History in This Happy Breed is shown as something that can be weathered, even ignored, by good old common sense. This might be admirable advice, but it makes for tedious drama. Waugh knows that history is a human tragedy, diminishing both the individual and collective endeavour; that stability is impossible no matter what stand you make; and that a recourse to the spiritual, while conferring a sad grandeur and nobility to inevitable human failure, is a poor substitute for life.
