The New Pictures

This Happy Breed (Rank-Universal) is Noel Coward's proud and loving tribute to the unbreakable British backbone. It tells the story of the lower-middle-class Gibbons family between Wars I & II. The film opens and ends with a fine Technicolor shot of the roofs of London. In the closing shot the roofs lie defenseless to the hell that is soon to crack them open. But by then, Coward has made clear how ready the people under the roofs are to endure the worst and to prevail against it. He shows this never through flat heroics, but through the quiet, immense courage, patience, kindliness and common sense which give structure, and a certain majesty, to 20 years of one family's life.

The plot is simple. It shows the family life of Frank Gibbons (Robert Newton), his wife Ethel (Celia Johnson) and their three children. Vi (Eileen Erskine), a docile creature, gives little trouble. She marries a young pinko, but quickly domesticates him. Reg (John Blythe), a charming, rather irresponsible boy, messes about on the left side of the general strike but marries and turns out well in the end. Then he is killed in an auto wreck. Queenie (Kay Walsh) is the real problem. A spirited, rebellious girl, with ideas above her class, she runs off with a married man and suffers the consequences. It is years before she is reunited with her gentle, sailor sweetheart (John Mills).

That is about all there is to the story. Comic relief and pathos are added by an acidulous grandma, a neurasthenic maiden aunt and an old wartime friend of Frank's (Sterling Holloway). But the real meat of This Happy Breed is in the many plotless little human studies which Coward writes with such relish--Frank's advice to his bridegroom son, delivered in the privacy of the bathroom, just before the wedding; snappish, jagged family quarrels; a touching drunk scene between the two aging ex-soldiers; Ethel's silent, terrible way of absorbing bitter news. The real hero of the film is time, as designated on the face of every player, in the growth, bloom and final bleakness of a fruit tree in the backyard, and by the deathly resonance of the empty house as the family leaves it.

If the film has any serious fault (occasional jerkiness and slowness of episodes are minor ones), it lies close to the heart of Noel Coward's particular kind of talent. His deep affection and respect for his subject cannot be questioned, nor can his deep knowledge of it (he came from just such a background). But he is an extremely clever man, with a great flair and fondness for theatrical trick and design, which, at their worst, can use emotions as if they were stage properties. When clever men try to write with complete sincerity and, at the same time, to apply their sophistication to simple matters, the result is sometimes specious and sentimental. There are ways of insisting that a character is the salt of the earth which are essentially patronizing. For example, the noble character of Frank (extremely well played by Mr. Newton) is often hurt by this unconscious patronage.

But Coward nearly always writes with much purer feeling about unsophisticated women, and Celia Johnson and Kay Walsh make the most of some beautiful opportunities. Miss Johnson has a subtly balanced melancholic power, and an ability to convey complex emotions simply, which derive from the great days of the stage, and are almost never seen in a film. And the excellent director, David Lean (In Which We Serve, Blithe Spirit, Brief Encounter), has again rendered Mr. Coward as rich a service as Mr. Coward has rendered him.

The Teachers' Crisis (MARCH OF TIME) puts the pointer on one of the biggest U.S. problems--education. By narrative, charts and acted episodes, the film dramatizes the fact that, with public school enrollments bigger than ever before, and constantly growing, the U.S. has fewer public-school teachers than it had in 1939. Of these teachers many are pitifully ill-trained "emergency" amateurs. (The film shows the too common spectacle of a teacher unable to work a problem she has given students.) Still others are psychologically unfit to teach (the film shows a stupid teacher calling a pupil stupid).

The best as well as the worst teachers are fantastically overworked. Only about half those enrolled in state normal schools and teachers' colleges intend to teach;* there are graduates enough from these training schools to fill only about a third of the positions open. The situation is such that few but the timid, the incompetent, and those rare souls who have a true vocation for teaching can or will stick with such a job. The pay is disgracefully low (the average teacher gets from $800 to $3,100 a year). Socially, teachers are held in a special kind of contempt and are subject to prying and coercion in their private lives--and are, as a rule, subject to threats and to firing without any possible means of self-defense.

U.S. education is, in short, in grave danger. Little can be done toward removing this danger unless enough ordinary citizens realize its nature and dimensions, and realize also that it is going to cost a good deal of hard tax money, as well as permanent change of attitude, to buy out of it. Because this issue of MARCH OF TIME describes this predicament tersely and forcefully, it can be incalculably useful if enough people see it, take it to heart, and act on it.

Time Out of Mind (Universal-International), another of Hollywood's fumbling attempts to tell a story about a creative artist, reveals chiefly how little Hollywood knows about the problem of artistic creation.

Christopher Fortune (Robert Hutton), a sensitive type, has music in his soul and wants to go to Paris to get it out. But his father (Leo G. Carroll), a rock-bound Maine sea captain, sends him to sea instead. When his father orders a second voyage, Chris does not tell the old man to go keelhaul himself, and then leave home, penniless, to write music. He just lolls around sniveling until his domineering sister (Ella Raines) and his adoring sweetheart (Phyllis Calvert) finagle money enough to send him to Paris. Later on, Chris shows his contempt for the financial side of his art; at a public concert which his socialite wife has promoted for him he digresses, in mid-concerto, into A Bicycle Built for Two. But at long last he climbs off his bicycle, finds himself, his genius, his proper mate (Miss Calvert) and, thanks to her promotional talents, plays a triumphant return concert.

The most gratifying moment in the show comes when an unpleasant fisherman (Eddie Albert) knocks Composer Chris silly. Mr. Albert has, in fact, the one rewarding role in the picture.

* The rest: ex-G.I.s and women crowded out of other colleges.

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