David Lean's first solo assignment, the second of his four packaging jobs for Noel Coward's middlebrow
enshrinement of British bourgeoisie. Charting two decades in the life of the Gibbons clan (headed by Robert
Newton and Celia Johnson) prior to the break of WWII, it extols the same cozy ordinariness and unshakable faith
in Mother England's imperialist ways that made Coward's Cavalcade a hit, with even less political awareness:
proletariat strikes and wars come and go, but happiness to this breed is blissful ignorance. Rebellion is extended
solely to Guy Verney's fervid smarty-pants and Kay Walsh's wayward teen daughter, both in Coward's eyes little more
than snippy brats in sore need of a lesson in mediocrity acceptance (though closer auteurist analysis bonds Walsh
to the director's rather more interestingly stifled heroines of Madeleine and Ryan's Daughter). Lean's handling
is fluid enough (a subtle camera movement prowls an empty drawing room to evoke the awareness of a character's
death), though his interest in human relationships, Brief Encounter notwithstanding, has always been thin-skinned
at best. Not that different from the airbrushed celebrations of wartime pluck packaged across the pond at MGM, posh
pedigree or not. Lean wrote the adaptation with Anthony Havelock-Allan and cinematographer Ronald Neame. With
John Mills, Stanley Holloway, Amy Veness, and Alison Leggatt.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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