Noel Coward drew upon his own background in writing this story of a middle-class suburban family during the two decades following World War I. The film was taken to heart by the very kinds of people it depicted; in an England exhausted by war, it topped the box office for 1944. Shot in a Technicolor deliberately made to “look less glorious,” in the words of cinematographer Ronald Neame, the film takes place almost entirely inside the Gibbons residence in Clapham, invoking the various meanings of home-house and country, family and people. The occupants and visitors represent a spectrum of social types, from radicals to class strivers, with Mr. and Mrs. Gibbons (Robert Newton and Celia Johnson) somewhere in the respectable, slightly worn middle. Small conflicts and family pleasures flow on as the years go by, punctuated by private tragedies and public ceremonies. What happens between historic events is simply life.