Saturday Night Cinema: Brief Encounter

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Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema classic the beautiful, painful story of forbidden love. Brief Encounter remains one of the screen’s all-time most romantic films.

The 1945 British romantic drama film is directed by David Lean about British suburban life, centering on Laura, whose conventional life becomes increasingly complicated because of a chance meeting at a railway station with a stranger.

After a chance meeting on a train platform, a married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) begin a muted but passionate, and ultimately doomed, love affair. With its evocatively fog-enshrouded setting, swooning Rachmaninoff score, and pair of remarkable performances (Johnson was nominated for an Oscar), this film, directed by David Lean and based on Noël Coward’s play Still Life deftly explores the thrill, pain, and tenderness of an illicit romance, and has influenced many a cinematic brief encounter since its release.

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Brief Encounter: the best romantic film of all time
David Lean, 1945
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter
David Thomson, Saturday 16 October 2010:

In how many other countries would a poll pick Brief Encounter as the best movie romance of all time? Even in Britain, I wonder how many people born since, say, 1975 would rate it so highly. But for a generation that remembers when the trains ran on time and station buffets were as tidy and inviting as the one in this movie, Brief Encounter is etched in nostalgia for an era when trapped middle-class lives contemplated adultery but set the disturbing thought aside. On the face of it, it would seem that Britain has changed; but is it possible that the David Lean-Noël Coward film is still the model for repressed feelings as an English ideal? We are accustomed to attributing films to directors, but it’s only proper to regard Coward as an equal author of this movie. He wrote the script, taking it from his own one-act play, Still Life. He made the leads “nice” people (Laura and Alec, a housewife and a doctor) and the supporting characters clear-cut English types – Stanley Holloway as the naughty, good-hearted station master and Joyce Carey as the bossy, buffet manageress, as well as Cyril Raymond who is quite exquisite as Laura’s husband, Fred, a decent dullard who senses that his wife has “been away” but cannot dream of what she has been up to or how close they have all come to disaster.

It is Coward’s preference, too, that family and stability are so respected in this film. Never married, and discreetly gay, Coward knew enough not to offend middle-class propriety. David Lean, on the other hand, was raised a strict Quaker and was always in rebellion against restraint – so he was married six times and, on his own, he might have pushed Laura and Alec a degree or two further than made Coward comfortable. If that sounds odd, you have to remember the extent to which Lean was Coward’s protege. The young editor had been noticed by Coward and promoted to help direct and then take over directing In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit and finally Brief Encounter.

So the relationship that begins at the Milford railway station (it’s two metaphorical stops down the line from Borchester – The Archers began five years after Brief Encounter) with a piece of grit in Laura’s eye and Alec’s unquestionably clean handkerchief will lead to afternoons together, lunch and a visit to the cinema (their silly movie is called Flames of Passion), a country drive, and an awkward trip to a friend’s flat (the supercilious Valentine Dyall). Nothing happens, and Alec will soon take his family to a new job in South Africa – in 1945 that was still a destination of some hope.

“Nothing happens” is hardly a motto for movies today. But at the end of the second world war, when cinemas were packed, desire on the screen was fabulously (and sometimes hysterically) inflamed by self-denial, shyness and censorship. It’s an open question, of course, but consider the possibility that movie romance, and its dream of desire, were stimulated by the various controls that blocked abandon. Those devices include our innocence. In 1945, there wasn’t a hint of irony or parody in the film’s pounding Rachmaninov score (the second piano concerto, played to the hilt by Eileen Joyce).

Today, the set-up begs for satire. But Brief Encounter has survived such threats, because it is so well made, because Laura’s voiceover narration is truly anguished and dreamy, because the music suckers all of us, and because Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard are perfect. I realise, “perfect” seems dangerously prim and old-hat, an ultimate proof of hopeless gentility. But that’s not fair. Howard could be a wild man – as we know from his later work – and you feel recklessness and revolution as a wind tugging at him.
As for Celia Johnson, it is due largely to her that the film is still so moving. Her agony and her rapture stay interior, and they flip-flop like nerves in this beautiful, grave black-and-white movie. Her voice is measured but the eyes are desperate. That she holds the film together is beyond doubt.

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Patrick
Patrick
7 years ago

Oh, if not for the ties that bind.

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7 years ago

Thank you for this treat. I hadn’t realized how much I wanted to see this again. I made some bath buns and a pot of tea, put on my jammies and settled down to watch.

Ethan Sparrow
Ethan Sparrow
7 years ago

I watched it the last time you put it up…and I watched it again last night…pure classic…
I remember Trevor Howard was reputed to be quite the smooth ladies’ man offscreen, too…

Methuselah, Child Refugee
Methuselah, Child Refugee
7 years ago

I love this film. It makes me long for a time when Britain seemed much simpler. Take for instance when Stanley Holloway has to eject the two young servicemen for being a bit cheeky to the buffet manageress (his sweetheart). These days they’d have kicked the Hell out of him rather than comply with his firm request to ‘hop it!’

The world really was better in black and white! Well, watching such classics as this, it seems it was anyway.

Steve
Steve
7 years ago

Isn’t it funny how we don’t think we about thirst until the water dries up.

Methuselah, Child Refugee
Methuselah, Child Refugee
7 years ago
Reply to  Steve

So true…

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