Brief Encounter
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| Brief Encounter | |
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| Directed by | David Lean |
| Produced by | Noel Coward Anthony Havelock-Allan Ronald Neame |
| Written by | Noel Coward Anthony Havelock-Allan David Lean, Ronald Neame |
| Starring | Celia Johnson Trevor Howard Stanley Holloway |
| Distributed by | Rank Organisation |
| Release date(s) |  26 November 1945 24 August 1946 |
| Running time | 86 min |
| Language | English |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Brief Encounter (1945) is a British film about a woman's temptation toward adultery. It was directed by David Lean and stars Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. The screenplay is by Noel Coward, and is based on his 1936 play Still Life. The film prominently features the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff on the soundtrack, played by Eileen Joyce.
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[edit] Synopsis
Laura Jesson, a country housewife, tells her story in the first person. Bored with the security of her husband and family, Laura goes into town once a week for shopping and a matinée picture. On one of her weekly excursions, she accidentally meets Dr. Alec Harvey in the refreshment room of the railway station. Both are early middle-aged, married, and have two children each. The doctor is working in the area because he wants to study miners' diseases.
Enjoying one another's company, the couple continue to meet weekly for a cup of tea in the refreshment room of the station while they await their respective trains home. They are soon dismayed to find their innocent and casual relationship quickly developing into love. For a while, they continue to meet furtively in cafes and cinemas, constantly fearing chance meetings with friends. After several meetings, they go to a room belonging to a friend of the doctor's, but their meeting is interrupted by the friend's unexpected return. Realizing that a future together is impossible and wishing not to hurt their families, they agree to part. The doctor is to leave for Africa.
During their final meeting at the station, while they sit waiting for Alec's train, Dolly Messiter, a talkative friend of Laura's, joins them and is soon chattering away, totally oblivious to the couple's inner misery. As they realize that they have been robbed of the chance for a final goodbye, Alec's train arrives. With Dolly still chattering away, Alec departs with a last look at Laura. As the train is heard pulling away, Laura suddenly dashes out onto the platform. The lights of the passing train flash across her face as she conquers her impulse to commit suicide; she then returns home to her family.
[edit] Adaptation
The film is based on Coward's play Still Life (1936), one of a group of ten short plays entitled Tonight at 8:30, designed for Gertrude Lawrence and Coward himself to be performed in various combinations as triple bills. All scenes of Still Life are set in the refreshment room of a railway station (the fictional Milford Junction).
As is normal in films based on stage plays, the film depicts places that are only talked about in the play: Dr. Lynn's flat, Laura's home, a cinema, a restaurant and a branch of Boots the Chemists. Additionally, a number of scenes have been added which are not mentioned in the play: a scene on a lake in a rowing boat where Dr. Harvey gets his feet wet; Laura wandering about alone in the dark, sitting down on a park bench and smoking in public; a drive in the country in a borrowed car.
Certain scenes are made less ambiguous and more dramatic in the film. The scene in which the two lovers are about to commit adultery is toned down: in the play it is left for the audience to decide whether they actually have sex or not, whereas in the film, Laura has only just arrived at Dr. Lynn's flat when its owner comes home, and is immediately led out by Dr. Harvey via the fire escape. Later, when Laura wants to throw herself in front of an express train, the film makes this intention clear by means of voice-over narration.
Unlike the play, the film uses a frame narrative: the ending of the story is at the beginning of the movie, which is then repeated at the end. It also uses voice-over, with Laura addressing her husband, or rather Laura imagining addressing her husband in a dream-like state.
At present, there are two editions of Noel Coward's original screenplay for the film adaptation, both listed in the bibliography below.
[edit] Production
Much of the film version was shot at Carnforth railway station in Lancashire, then a junction on the London, Midland and Scottish Railway. As well as a busy station being necessary for the plot, it was located far enough from London to be brightly lit for film purposes, shooting taking place in early 1945 before the War had finished. Noel Coward makes the station announcements in the film. The station buffet was a studio recreation. Carnforth Station still retains many of the period features present at the time of filming and remains a place of pilgrimage for fans of the film.[1] However, some of the urban scenes were shot in London or at Beaconsfield near Denham Studios where the film was made.[2]
[edit] Music
As well as the Rachmaninoff 2nd Piano Concerto which recurs throughout the film, there is a scene in a tea room where a salon orchestra plays the Spanish Dance No 5 (Bolero) by Moritz Moszkowski.
[edit] Awards and recognition
The film shared the 1946 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1999 it came 2nd in a British Film Institute poll of the top 100 British films. In 2004, the magazine Total Film named it the 44th greatest British film of all time. Derek Malcolm included the film in his 2000 column The Century of Films.
[edit] Criticism
In her book Noël Coward (1987), Frances Gray says that Brief Encounter is,
- after the major comedies, the one work of Coward that almost everybody knows of and has probably seen; it has featured frequently on television and its viewing figures are invariably high. Its story is that of an unconsummated affair between two married people. [...]
- Coward is keeping his lovers in check because he cannot handle the energies of a less inhibited love in a setting shorn of the wit and exotic flavour of his best comedies. [...] To look at the script, shorn of David Lean's beautiful camera work, deprived of an audience who would automatically approve of the final sacrifice, is to find oneself asking awkward questions. A disastrous attempt in 1975 to remake the film in a more up-to-date setting, with Richard Burton and Sophia Loren as Alec and Laura, made this plain. (pp.64-67).
Gray acknowledges a common criticism of the play: why don't the characters just go ahead and do it? Why do they feel guilty, watched and hunted all the time? They do not seem to be particularly religious, so what's the problem? Gray argues that their problem is class consciousness: the working classes can be and act vulgar, and the upper class can be silly; but the middle class is or at least considers itself the moral backbone of society - a notion whose validity Coward did not really want to question or jeopardize (since they were Coward's principal audience).
However, Laura (from whose point of view the film is told) makes it clear that what holds her back is her horror at the thought of betraying her husband and her settled moral values, tempted although she is by the force of the love affair. Indeed, it is this very tension which has made the film such an enduring favourite and it rather misses the point to suggest that this is a weakness rather than its most important feature.
The values which Laura precariously, but ultimately successfully, clings to were widely shared and respected (if not always observed) at the time of the film's original setting (the status of a divorced woman, for example, remained sufficiently scandalous in the UK to cause the King to abdicate in 1936). Updating the story left those values behind and with them vanished the credibility of the plot, which may be why the remake could not compete.[3]
The film is widely admired for the beauty of its black and white photography and the atmosphere created by the steam-age railway setting; both of which were particular to the original David Lean version.[4]
The film is working in the social and cultural context of the Second World War when 'brief encounters' were commonplace and women had far greater sexual and economic freedom than was normal. In British National Cinema (1997), Sarah Street argues that "Brief Encounter thus articulated a range of feelings about infidelity which invited easy identification, whether it involved one's husband, lover children or country" (p. 55). In this context, feminist critics read the film as an attempt at stabilising relationships to return to the status quo.[citation needed] Meanwhile, in his 1993 BFI book on the film, Richard Dyer notes that due to the rise of homosexual law reform, gay men also viewed the plight of the characters as comparable to their own social constraint in the formation and maintenance of relationships. Sean O'Connor considers the film to be an 'allegorical representation of forbidden love' informed by Noel Coward's experiences as a closeted homosexual (p. 157).
A made-for-TV version of Brief Encounter, starring Richard Burton and Sophia Loren, was made in 1974.
[edit] Bibliography (Including Screenplays)
- Coward, Noel. Brief Encounter: Screenplay. London: Lorrimer, 1984. ISBN 0-85647-098-8
- Coward, Noel. Brief Encounter: Screenplay. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. ISBN 0-571-19680-2
- Dyer, Richard. Brief Encounter. London: BFI, 1993. ISBN 0-85170-362-3
- O'Connor, Sean. Straight Acting: Popular Gay Drama from Wilde to Rattigan. London: Cassell, 1998. ISBN 0304328669
- Street, Sarah. British National Cinema. London: Routledge, 1997. ISBN 0-415-06736-7
[edit] References
- ^ BBC Cumbria website
- ^ Whitaker, Brian (comp.) (1990). Notes & Queries. Fourth Estate. ISBN 1-872180-22-1
- ^ Handford, Peter (1980). Sounds of Railways. David & Charles. ISBN 0-7153-7631-4
- ^ Huntley, John (1993). Railways on the Screen. Ian Allan. ISBN 0-7110-2059-0
[edit] External links
- Brief Encounter at the Internet Movie Database
- Brief Encounter at the BFI's Screenonline. Full synopsis and film stills (and clips viewable from UK libraries).
- Criterion Collection essay by Adrian Turner
- Brief Encounter Tea Room at Wymondham railway station
| David Lean | |
|---|---|
| 1940s | In Which We Serve (with Noel Coward) | This Happy Breed | Blithe Spirit | Brief Encounter | Great Expectations | Oliver Twist | The Passionate Friends |
| 1950s | Madeleine | The Sound Barrier | Hobson's Choice | Summertime | The Bridge on the River Kwai |
| 1960s | Lawrence of Arabia | Doctor Zhivago |
| 1970s | Ryan's Daughter |
| 1980s | A Passage to India |
| Television | Lost and Found: The Story of Cook's Anchor (1979) |
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | 1945 films | Black and white films | British films | English-language films | Film remakes | Films based on plays | Palme d'Or winners | Films directed by David Lean | Rail transport in fiction | Romantic drama films
