I had seen Brief Encounter many years ago on television, and only vaguely remembered it as something pretty insipid. Downright vapid and feeble.
What a disservice that memory was, to what is in fact a minor masterpiece of style, mood, acting and direction.
This is certainly not a film which could be made today. Its theme, of two married people who fall hopelessly in love after casual meetings at a railway station, is out of tune with today's society. The choice of a new future, or sacrificing love and passion to protect the family, would seem anachronistic.
But this is set (and filmed) in 1945, not today. And if you approach viewing the movie from that stance, and from the stance of characters firmly set in England's repressed middle-class milieu, then the drama is compelling, and the choices which have to be made are truly agonising.
There are really only four actors in this piece, plus a few minor roles. The two characters, Laura Jesson (played by Celia Johnson) and Dr Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) dominate as the two people helplessly in love. Around them are a working-class couple, railway guard Albert Godby (stalwart Cockney actor Stanley Holloway - remember him as Alfred Doolittle?) and railway cafeteria manager Myrtle Bagot (Joyce Carey), in a more carefree counterpoint to the agony of Laura and Alec.
The acting is sensational! Celia Johnson was famed for her stage work rather than film, and her acting is restrained, very natural and intensely moving. Her voiceover narration sets an elegiacal tone for the film - it does not spoil the movie to reveal that the two lovers have to part, since this is revealed by her in voiceover at the very start, as she begins to tell the story of this secret passion.
Her voice is beautifully modulated and wonderfully moving. Her face is not glamorous by Hollywood standards. She has large, luminous eyes, but her whole appearance is as is meant to be - she is an average woman approaching middle age, set firmly in middle-class ways. No glamour here, just intense restrained feeling. She was nominated in 1946 for the Oscar as Best Actress - the Award went that year to Olivia de Havilland, but time will prove to be on Celia's side.
Trevor Howard is perfectly cast as her would-be lover. He is ruggedly handsome, very British, but with a slight louche aspect which lets him pursue Celia with real eagerness. We really never know if he won more than her heart - there are some unexplained afternoon hours on their final day together - that aspect is left to our imagination.
The film is an expanded version of Noel Coward's short play Still Life, which was one of several plays presented in random order during the course of a season of short pieces known collectively as Tonight at 8.30. Perhaps the best known works from this program are Shadowplay and Red Peppers.
The screenplay was written by Coward in conjunction with David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame (the last two being producers of the film), but it bears all the stamps of a solo Coward work - the way quite often his words only hint at a far deeper meaning - superficial chatter slowly revealing underlying reality. His style was the precursor of Harold Pinter, and I think English working-class kitchen-sink drama really developed from his middle-class but very subversive and perceptive style.
I would place this as one of director David Lean's three greatest movies, up there with Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and way ahead of the later relatively bloated Hollywood-style widescreen epics such as Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago. He is in fact on a par with - and similar in style to - the other great English director of this period, Carol Reed, with his Odd Man Out and The Third Man.
Finally, a quick note on the music. Noel Coward insisted that the film use as its atmospheric soundtrack excerpts from the great Second Piano Concert of Sergei Rachmaninoff. This film helped bring this late-Romantic concerto to a huge audience. It also brought to that audience the wonderful pianist Eileen Joyce, who performed on the soundtrack.
The strikingly-beautiful Eileen Joyce was just 35 when she recorded for this film. Her mother was Spanish, her father Irish, and the family wandered Tasmania looking for work. Her family moved to Kalgoorlie when she was 14, and a priest discovered her musical abilities. A scholarship soon followed - and before she was 20 she was performing in Europe, her fame steadily growing. A great story in itself!
