Film Review – Brief Encounter

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Spoilers Those who know my love of science fiction, fantasy, horror and action driven movies / literature may be surprised that I often get drawn to love stories, romances, and more pedestrian dramas. The film that started this for me was 1945’s Brief Encounter which I watched on TV one afternoon, startling my grandparents when they saw me weeping at the ending, aged about ten. The film was written and produced by Noel Coward (who can be heard announcing the train times on the station tannoy), and directed by David Lean though with nothing like the budget he would pour into Laurence Of Arabia. Though made as World War Two was drawing to an end, it is set just before hostilities and based on Coward’s stage play Still Life. Celia Johnson plays a housewife and mother who gets a Thursday treat every week, a day to go off alone to visit the library and take in a matinee movie. One week, waiting for her train home, she gets some grit in her eye and she is treated by a doctor, a GP, played by Trevor Howard, a married man, also waiting for a train (not the same one). The pair become friends and slide dangerously close to an adulterous affair as he joins her at the cinema, they go boating, and she visits his flat, all the while lying to her well meaning but dull husband. The would be lovers realise they are likely to destroy one another’s marriages and the Doctor gets himself a transfer, leading to them planning a final farewell meeting at the station, but they are denied full closure when her friend turns up unexpectedly leaving Celia Johnson suicidally depressed. Though set in a fictional town called Milford, the dominant railway waiting room / tea room scenes were shot on Lancashire’s Carnforth Station which retains the set as a museum set piece on the still operational station to this day. Finding the film on Youtube after all these years and visiting the station itself was a real joy and again I was moved to tears by this lovely sad little tale. The overwhelming sense is that the couple would be happier together than in their current marriages but they are too conservative to embrace change. Youtube - the full movie Arthur Chappell