One Interesting Prop

This Happy Breed (1944) is one of director David Lean's lesser-known films. I watched it a few months ago as part of my ongoing quest to see all of his films (I've now seen four of seventeen - quite a way still to go), and I was mesmerised. Crucially, it's adapted from a Noël Coward play (just like my favourite film, Brief Encounter), and so it has that brilliant complexity and sense of place I've come to expect from Coward.

In it, we follow a London family between the first and second world wars, and the changing family dynamics and dramas set alongside the shifting world and its politics create a really vivid picture of their lives. This is enhanced by the film's use of Technicolor, which is really striking in a film from the mid-1940s, but maybe made even moreso in the staging of a very normal, very brown London flat.

Celia Johnson in her brown outfit, in her brown flat.

The title itself is a reference to a monologue from Shakespeare's Richard II, which refers to England as "This happy breed of men, this little world", which speaks to the sort of grand, misty melancholy of this story and its laser focus on great change and loss.

It's the props, too, that make the movie feel alive. As we pass through the decades, we see tons of interesting historical objects - sometimes window displays, but often newspapers. One such newspaper is prominently featured in a shot that lingers pointedly on its front page headline: GERMAN FASCISTS' GREAT ELECTION SUCCESS.

I was curious, given that the date is clearly visible here, whether this was a replica of the real Daily Mirror front page from the 16th of September, 1930. So I found the real cover, and here it is:

As you can see, the story about the German election is there, and looks very similar, but the major headline concerns the murder of an English woman in France. I find it really amazing to look at the prop version of the paper, obviously changed for visual clarity since the narrative is interested in the rise of the Nazis and wants to show us this event through ephemera. 

I was struck by the paper's language, too. The Mirror refers to the 'National Socialist Party' much more prominently as the 'German Fascist Party'. It's really interesting to see the particular language that was used at the time. 'German Fascist Party' seems so intense and direct, and that's bolstered by the description of them - they 'favour a dictatorship'. So true.

While the newspaper had to be altered for the sake of the shot's communication of the pertinent historical record, I love how much they maintained the look of the original cover. Every detail is meticulously correct where possible. It's quite haunting.

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Here are some other shots from the movie that I like: