MovieChat Forums > This Happy Breed (1947) Discussion > Did Noel Coward actually take this movie...

Did Noel Coward actually take this movie *seriously?*


Or was he just having a laugh?

I have a hard time believing that he was the one who wrote this hopelessly sappy drivel. Don't get me wrong: I happened to love this drivel. It's just that I can't believe someone as cynical and wordly-wise as Coward wrote it, that's all.

Your thoughts?

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Yes, Noel Coward did indeed take the film/play and story very seriously indeed.
He wrote it during the 2nd World War when he was desperate to do something to help his country - he was fiercely patriotic and proud of being British etc at a time when his whole world was crumbling.
He in fact came from a background very similar to the Gibbons' family and was determined to tell the story of the ordinary working classes in England whom he admired so much - particularly in the brave way the British people coped with the Blitz and all the wartime tragedies around them and still showed great humour and fortitude!
There you go - he wasn't the hard bitten worldly wise cynic he sometimes appeared!

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To be fair, though, he didn't take the movie as seriously as the play. He wanted to play the role of Frank Gibbons himself and was most distressed when Robert Newton got the role. Newton and Coward couldn't stand each other.

It's a great film. Love the interaction between Robert Newton and Stanley Holloway.

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You have to have lived in England to understand the sentimentality of this film.
Yes, Noel Coward was as cynical as they come, but he was also a great English patriot who tirelessly entertained the troops and did everything he could to save England. If you didn't live in a country that was bombed or invaded during the World Wars, it will be hard to understand how grateful one can be for a little house, and your country to be normal again. This was not a false side of Noel Coward. He was a true Englishman who loved his country, and could cry for it.

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two years earlier he wrote, directed and appeared in "In Which We Serve" about destroyer duty in the British navy. It is considered a war time classic.

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>You have to have lived in England to understand the sentimentality of this film.


Are you quite sure about that? I'm a Yank who's never been to England yet I find the sentimentality of this film understandable and deeply moving. The movie seeks to reassure a population who had been through so much in the past quarter century and faced more trouble in an ever-darkening world. First there was the Great War, which took the lives of so many young men and blighted the lives of so many who survived it. Then came the Roaring Twenties, giddy and vibrant, yes, but also uncertain and full of strife. There followed the Great Depression and the growing militarism and nationalism on the Continent. By the time this film was made, English people needed all the bracing they could get.

And who better to give it to them than Noel Coward? I've read his published journals and despite a flamboyant life-style, his core values were middle-class in the very best sense, solid, sturdy and indomitable. He believed in hard work and in England and threw himself into serving his country with what I consider great gallantry.

We in the States never had to face the same kind of darkness so near at hand as the English did yet I cannot watch this movie without being touched by the courage and spirit of the ordinary English people it portrays and by the patriotism that prompted Coward to make it.

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Excellent comment LCC - I think this movie is one of the most underrated movies around. Noel Coward seems to hit the right note in so many places in the movie - I was telling my family about buttering the paws on the cat - my mother knew that one. He pulls together some threads and seems to get in touch with the people - lord knows how, as you write (and I've read his diaries too) he had a different life entirely to the Gibbons once he made it. I suspect he always kept his feet on the ground. He was devoted to his mother, I recall.

BTW I can't imagine Noel Coward playing the role that Robert Newton played - his acting in "The Astonished Heart" was fairly bad.

I'm interested in the US take on Coward. In some ways George M. Cohan seems the similar talent on your side of the Atlantic. Do you see any similarities? Cohan and Coward both covered several professions.

And for what it's worth, I always get a lump in my throat at the end of 'In Which we Serve' - where John Mills and Kay Walsh were teamed up again.

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>>>>>>>I'm interested in the US take on Coward. In some ways George M. Cohan seems the similar talent on your side of the Atlantic. Do you see any similarities? Cohan and Coward both covered several professions. >>>>>>

I think Noel Coward was a much more diverse talent than Cohan.

Here in the U.S., from the thirties to the sixties, if you looked up 'Englishman' in the dictionary, there was a picture of Noel Coward........
well, there 'should' have been.:)

Coward and Cohan had a few differing skill sets; Coward wrote plays and screenplays, Cohan wrote stageplays; Cohan was certainly the more prolific songwriter, but I think Coward has a much more 'lasting impression' to this day; his plays are still produced all over the world, and of course he has ongoing recognition with the airing of his movies on television. Cohan's material seems extremely dated compared to Coward's.

Noel Coward was a bon vivant, a man of the world, whereas Cohan was a meat-and- potatoes Irish-American, which was enough for him.

Both men had enormous public appeal; Cohan's was limited to Vaudeville and the Broadway stage; his 'life' translated to the movies, but his plays did not, as they were for the most part extensions, variations, and re-workings of his vaudeville acts. Plus Cohan's popularity was limited by the technology of the time that was available to him. Coward took advantage of every technology as it came along; better recording technology, movies and television.

They were both incredible patriots with great love for their countries.

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You are absolutely right, LCC.:)

Maybe I should have said, you have to appreciate the twenties, thirties and forties, and the movies that were made during that period.:)

I usually have Turner Classic Movies on.... with the sound off.... just for some 'movement' in the corner. I usually only turn the sound up for black and white movies.:)

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the word 'sentimental' is getting tossed around, but this movie isn't usually sentimental - it's nostalgic. they are two different things.

the watcher experiences pretty much all the plot points right as the characters do, and that removes (or is the opposite of) sentimentality. a partial exception occurs during the absurd shot, right after the grandma and aunt/spinster learn about the death of the son, when the camera then holds on empty space and rotates around maybe 250 degrees and then the mom and dad slowly walk into the frame in a full shot two shot, sad after hearing the death news. even this shot isn't sentimentality proper, though - if it was, the parents would not have learned of the death offscreen, they would've learned of it onscreen AFTER the viewer did, ie, walked into the shot all happy/normal, then hear the news, and be crushed. by having them learn the news offscreen (in essentially real-time, after the girl left the frame in the earlier scene to go tell them), it saps some of the sentimentality from it, but the superlong held shot was waayyy too narrative/didactic, and i think ended up with a similar feel as sentimentality proper - we were left waiting to see them experience the news after already knowing it ourselves instead of experiencing it with them.

another note on sentimentality here is the first shot of the movie. it's gag where we start with an interior full shot of a house with a frosty-paned front door. dramatic/maudlin music plays, a shadow silhouette appears beyond the frosted glass, the viewer anticipates a return scene with a war hero father arriving home from war. but, a scrawny man with a seedy mustache steps in, makes some comment about the location and price of the house, and appears in every way a used car salesman-like realtor. a few dialog lines later we learn he actually is the dad returned back from war, but to zero fanfare, and not to his longtime home, but a new house that needs rebuilding. they ripped out the sentimentality right from the start.

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If you didn't live in a country that was bombed or invaded during the World Wars, it will be hard to understand how grateful one can be for a little house, and your country to be normal again.


That's true: it's hard to understand the horrors and deprivation that wartime brought on unless you were there yourself. Reading about them in the 21st Century does help, but it's not the same thing as being there and having to undergo them yourself.

Despite this, it's hard not to be impressed with the fact that food rationing lasted fourteen years. That is, it didn't end with the end of WWII but continued for nearly a decade afterward (with meat rationing finally ending in 1954). Paul Fussell's book Wartime focuses mostly on the American civilian experience of WWII, but it does spend some time talking about what the British went through as far as shortages and rationing (e.g. a man in the UK could only hope to purchase a new suit once every two years, while he was eligible to purchase a new shirt every 20 months.

With the relative plenty of the 21st Century (even in these times) it all sounds a little incredible.


This was not a false side of Noel Coward. He was a true Englishman who loved his country, and could cry for it.


I'm grateful for all the responses as they have helped me to realize that being cynical and worldly-wise doesn't necessarily preclude one from feeling strongly about his fellow man and feeling a sense of solidarity with them.

I hope to have a chance to see this on the Silver Screen again.




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