Brief Encounter (1945) - film review

Each Thursday, housewife Laura Jesson treats herself to a day in the nearby town of Milford, to do some shopping and watch a film at the cinema.  Afterwards, she takes the train back to her comfortable suburban home where her husband and two children await her.   It’s a drab life but Laura is not unhappy.  Then, one evening, she strikes up an acquaintance with Alec Harvey, a man she meets whilst waiting for a train.  He is a doctor who does consultancy work at Milford hospital every Thursday.  Like her, he is married, middle-aged, and has two young children.  After that one chance encounter, Laura’s life suddenly changes.  She begins seeing Alec every Thursday afternoon.  At first, neither sees anything wrong with their liaisons.  But then they realise that they have become more than just friends.  They are in love - hopelessly in love...

Although often misrepresented (usually by people who have never seen the film), Brief Encounter is assuredly one of the great all-time classics of British cinema – and also one of the finest of fictional romances.  It was made in the last year of World War II, when social attitudes and individual morality were very different from what they are today.  The conflict that we see in this film – between society’s expectations of married people and an individual’s need for emotional fulfilment – is quite hard to appreciate today, yet it is this which gives the film its power and makes its ending so devastatingly poignant.  The story is every bit as tragic and as moving as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette, a tale of two lovers whose hopes of a happy future together are cruelly frustrated by circumstances beyond their control.   

Brief Encounter was adapted from a 30-minute one act play, entitled Still Life, which Noel Coward wrote in 1935.  It was directed by David Lean, the last and best of his four collaborations with Coward.  Celia Johnson was offered the lead part in the film on the strength of her performance in an earlier Coward-Lean film, This Happy Breed (1944).  Her co-star, Trevor Howard, was relatively inexperienced, this being only his third film role.

More than anything, it is the performances which make Brief Encounter such an unforgettable film.  Celia Johnson is extraordinary in this film, conveying, with great subtlety and pathos, the torment of a love affair that takes possession of her character, and ends up by tearing her life apart.  The sense of aching loss she shows towards the end of the film is so real that it is almost unbearable to watch – a naked spectacle of desolation and anguish.  Whilst Johnson and Howard dominate the film, we can still appreciate the contributions from the supporting cast.  Particularly memorable are Stanley Holloway and Joyce Carey, whose characters’ blatant over-the-counter flirtations provide an amusing (and bitterly ironic) counterpoint to the main story.

Noel Coward not only wrote the film’s screenplay, but he also had some input into its production (although not so much as in his earlier collaborations with Lean).  One of the things he insisted on was the use of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 as the main theme for the film.  It was an inspired decision because this particular piece of music, used generously throughout the film, underscores perfectly the emotional turbulence which gradually surfaces and ultimately engulfs the two protagonists as their love affair develops, from a thing of lyrical beauty to one of immense tragedy.  Lean’s inspired composition of the film lends it further emotional depth and realism – particularly the use of film noir-like cinematography (emphasising the sense of guilt and isolation) and narrative flashbacks with a voiceover which allows us to share Laura’s intimate thoughts. 

One problem posed by the production was where to shoot the railway station sequences, which were an integral part of the story.  Because of blackout restrictions at the time of filming, the south of England (where most of the shoot was done) had to be ruled out.  The production team had to go as far as Carnforth station in Lancashire, which was sufficiently far from London that adequate notice could be given for the lights to be extinguished in the event of an air raid.

Although David Lean and his producers had some anxiety over how the film would be received when it was released (at a time of national austerity), it proved to be a critical and commercial success.  Celia Johnson won the New York Film Critics Circle Best Actress Award and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1947 (one of the film’s three Oscar nominations, the others being for Best Director and Best Screenplay). The film’s biggest trophy was the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1946.

If Brief Encounter were made today it would almost certainly appear over-sentimental, shallow, cliché-riddled and unconvincing.  None of these epithets applies to the film that David Lean made back in 1945, with limited resources and during one of England’s bleakest periods in the Twentieth Century.  The emotional impact of this film is keenly felt and absolutely genuine, and the story it tells is one which has universal appeal.  No one, apart from the most cynical and insensitive of spectators, can fail to be moved by the film’s final scene, a tear-jerker in the truest sense of the word.

© James Travers 2008

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