"This Happy Breed", David Lean, 1944

[Belle]

This beautiful film, restored and in Technicolor, is an earlier one from the great David Lean. It follows the lives of a working class family in London from the end of WW1 until the start of WW2. Written by Noel Coward, photographed by Ronald Neame, the film stars Celia Johnson as the mother and the great Robert Newton has her husband. Johnson always had a quiet stoicism in her performances, especially in Lean's "Brief Encounter". Newton, a drop-down alcoholic in real life, gives a performance of subtlety and strength in this, his finest role in a somewhat shortened life of 50 years. (It's actually a toss up between this film and 'Odd Man Out' for Carol Reed.)

Lean's opening shot into the home of the Gibbons family - a long tracking shot from outside a window, through it into the house and stopping at the front door - would have inspired Hitchcock for the opening scene of "Psycho". The film must have provided a salve to the people of England during those difficult war years with a promise of the return to family life and a reminder of what they were fighting for (as if one were needed). It's a paean to London working class suburbia and its minutiae of time-honoured cultural rituals.

There is one scene in the film which is a stand-out and it represents the start of David Lean's career as a great director. One of the Gibbons' married children, Reg, and his wife have been killed in a car accident. His sister has to break the news to mother and father Gibbons. The parents are out in the garden (off screen) and the family room is cleared so that they're not prematurely alerted to the tragedy before the news is delivered sensitively by their daughter. Jazz music is playing on the radio and this is a scene where sound is an important narrative tool. Lean keeps this music going, together with a gentle tracking shot to the right from inside the loungeroom, gradually attempting to peer leftwards to the couple in the garden outside, where they remain off screen. Children can be heard loudly playing. The camera represents the audience's point of view; moving forward right, then to the left as if to see what's happening. However, Lean's audience must use its imagination for the scene where the tragic news is broken as we wait for the characters to meet the camera as they come inside. Lean designs the cheerful music to provide a counterpoint to the stoicism and shock of the Gibbons parents who utter no words of dialogue. At 1:19:00 here. This is the work of an assured film director and a masterful scene of inspired understatement - and only the third time in the film where the camera becomes prominent for the audience, the last being the closing shot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3JVvVqxx64