David Lean (1945)
The refreshments room at Milford Junction railway station is arguably the most famous location in British cinema. It’s where the married-to-other-people, middle-class lovers of Brief Encounter – Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) – first meet and finally part. The desperately restrained tenor of this adaptation by Noël Coward of his one-act play Still Life is equally well known[1]. Putting the two together, I’d supposed before I eventually saw the film the pair were so controlled that their affair was conducted entirely in the station buffet – and expressed only in increasingly passionate conversation and eye contact. In fact, they lunch, go to the pictures, boating and driving together – one afternoon, they even go back to the flat that Alec has borrowed from a medical colleague (who returns unexpectedly – so they don’t get the chance to do much there). And, in a rare OTT sequence, Laura’s fantasy of their touring the romantic capitals of the world is visualised in the train window as she travels home to her nice, solid, unexciting husband and her son and daughter (who sound like posh versions of the Woodentops children). Admiring a stiff upper lip as it encourages a trembling lower one, describing two respectable people convulsed by passion but finally accepting their responsibilities to others – this is practically the national film of Middle England. No doubt it became so originally because its sensibilities were perceived as typically English. (And the film, presented from the female lead’s point of view, was released in the year that saw the end of a war during which many women had the opportunity to be unfaithful to absent husbands.) But Brief Encounter‘s popularity endures largely because the world it describes is a vanished one. There’s no sign or threat of violence beyond emotional turbulence. The refreshments room is peopled with perfectly calibrated representatives of different social classes; it trades in pounds, shillings and, especially, pence; the sound of steam trains (which run on time?) reverberates through the place with huge nostalgic power. The film represents the beginnings of David Lean as an international director and the climax to Noël Coward’s career in cinema. The impasto on Brief Encounter is unusually rich.
The film is emotionally absorbing; what’s resistible is its masochism. Laura is imagining that she’s telling her husband, Fred (Cyril Raymond), the story of her and Alec, when, as she also says, Fred’s the last person she could actually tell – in other words, Alec will remain an unspoken secret. During their first afternoon together – before they realise they’ve fallen in love, and with the two lead actors really sparking and the deftness of the dialogue almost elating – there’s a short break to the prevailing claustrophobia of Brief Encounter. Nearly the whole of the flashback story that Laura narrates is, however, filtered through the viewer’s miserable awareness that her affair with Alec is doomed: leaving aside that the film’s unhappy ending has become part of British folk memory, we know from Laura’s opening words that she and Alec have parted. The narrative structure, although ingeniously apt, is also something of a cheat: we’re told that Laura’s miserable and are primed for melancholy before we can truly sympathise with her. As she sits in an armchair at home, the set of Celia Johnson’s shoulders tells us that she feels a million miles from her husband, who sits a few feet away. Johnson’s voice and face are instruments of rare emotional sensitivity, used to highly expressive effect whenever Laura is saying or looking one thing and feeling another. She has no such opportunity for contrast in the narrative, however; though it may be unkind to say so, her dolorous voiceover becomes, at times, an instrument of torture. The film’s theme of buttoned-up emotionality, the sensitive precision of the writing and David Lean’s concentrated direction seem to coalesce in Celia Johnson’s voice. It epitomises what’s admirable, powerful but also oppressive about the talents at work in Brief Encounter. (Besides, although the narration that Coward has given Laura is psychologically penetrating, there’s too much of it. It’s frustrating when Johnson’s face or body tells you what she’s thinking and her words on the soundtrack then make sure that you’ve got the message.)
The woman’s role is nevertheless more convincingly developed than the man’s. Like his near-contemporary Terence Rattigan, Noël Coward had a talent for understanding and animating the guilty secret passion of an intelligent woman of the time. (It’s reasonable to think this had something to do with the writer’s being an intelligent homosexual male of the time.) Alec is conceived primarily as the object of Laura’s desire and used to point up her reactions. Trevor Howard gives a graceful, likeable performance but Alec is opaque and, in the couple’s most passionate moments, he has to keep summarising their situation in purplish lines of the we-feel-low-and-wretched-but-we-must-be-very-brave-and-very-strong-my-darling variety. More troubling is Coward’s condescension towards his characters. When Laura says, ‘I never knew ordinary people could feel such violent disturbance’, you may find yourself suspecting that the Master is speaking for himself. (It’s hard to forget that the highlights of his plays often occur when brilliant, self-assured people make heartless fun of mousy, self-doubting ones.)
The lower orders are patronised in a different way. It’s verging on offensive when Laura wanders desolately through the station after dark and hears a satisfied, dirty giggle – the sound of proletarian lovemaking. (The implication is that it’s easy for them – they don’t have consciences to wrestle with.) And, as the deliberately cheerful station master, Stanley Holloway’s eagerness to please the audience fuses with the conception of his character to uncomfortable effect. Joyce Carey, though, does a spectacular turn as Myrtle Bagot, the buffet manageress and Holloway’s romantic (and virtual double-act) partner. Myrtle’s attempts to act refeened are frantically vain – a facial and vocal tightrope walk. Joyce Carey revels in this: she sustains the mannerisms with crack timing and at such speed that your admiration for the performer transcends doubts about what she’s being asked to perform. These concerns may sound pompous: the point is, though, that the Holloway and Carey characters are meant to be comical essentially because of their social standing. By contrast, Dolly Messiter, Laura’s exhausting, chattering acquaintance who interrupts the lovers as they’re saying goodbye, is comical because of the personality, not the class of woman, she is. (And Dolly is brilliantly individualised by Everley Gregg.)
There are so many good things in this film: the piece of grit in Laura’s eye that brings about the initial contact with Alec; the detail and accumulation of her lies to her husband; the final suggestion that Fred realises more than she had thought. The overtly passionate elements (discreetly rationed shots of trains hurtling through tunnels, lavish helpings of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto) are welcome contrapuntal effects. The black-and-white cinematography is by the celebrated Robert Krasker. If it’s not easy to be sure how free a hand Noël Coward gave David Lean, it’s harder still to find flaws in the latter’s execution. Yet I have to admit to a sinking feeling whenever I see Brief Encounter listed in a television schedule. In a chat show appearance not long before he died, David Lean was asked by Terry Wogan if he’d thought any of his pictures were stinkers before audiences and critics assured him otherwise. Lean chose Brief Encounter because, he said, at a preview showing one woman in the audience got the giggles and, by the end of the film, the whole theatre was rocking with laughter. Wogan and his studio audience reacted with suitable incredulity (and Lean’s face made it clear that so they should). But if you don’t tune in to the sensitive wavelength of the story, you’ll find that its protagonists’ self-control is infectious only up to a precarious point. Beyond that point, the preview audience’s reaction is very understandable. In the end, Brief Encounter isn’t so much a rich tapestry of human passions as a finely-woven wet blanket.
[1990s]
[1] In fact, it’s a moot point as to whether Coward is the adaptor. The rather sparse opening credits refer to the film as ‘Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter’. There isn’t a specific writing credit. Coward is named as producer; Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame are ‘in charge of production’. The Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay was to Havelock-Allan, Neame and David Lean – no mention of Coward. It seems clear enough, however, that he was the boss of the production, as well as the author of the original material: you sense that, even if he wasn’t responsible for every line of dialogue, he always had the last word. I’m assuming that in this note.