THIS HAPPY BREED

Iconic director David Lean (LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO) brings to vivid emotional life Noël Coward’s play of a working-class family in the London suburbs over the course of two decades. Robert Newton (OLIVER TWIST) and Celia Johnson (BRIEF ENCOUNTER) are affecting as Frank and Ethel Gibbons, a couple with three children whose modest household is touched by joy and tragedy from the tail end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second. The film’s panorama is an archetypal Noël Coward mixture of good-natured comedy, sharp wit, glowing nostalgia and heart-tugging sentimentality.