David Lean (1949)

The BFI season in June-July 2008 to mark David Lean’s centenary has given prominence to this fascinating film, one of Lean’s least well-known.   It was made three years after Brief Encounter and can be seen as some kind of companion piece.  The audience coming out of the National Film Theatre seemed to want to see it that way – with jokes about the characters being frightfully noble, etc.   But The Passionate Friends is a very different piece of work.  It’s much more psychologically complex and disturbing than Brief Encounter and the characters are similar only to the extent that they talk in accents which (now anyway) sound like those of the couple in the better-known film and that Trevor Howard plays comparable roles in both films.  It’s hard to think that The Passionate Friends’ relative commercial failure at the time of its release was due to people feeling that it repeated Brief Encounter.  It’s much more likely that audiences found at least two of the three main characters hard to like.

The narrative structure of the film moves in flashback from Switzerland in the late 1940s to a ball that brings in New Year 1939 to the first phase of the romance between Mary (Ann Todd) and a young academic Stephen (Howard) some years before that.   At that time, Mary refuses to marry Stephen because she sees being in a strong, loving relationship as a pressure, an intensity that she doesn’t want.  Stephen tells her that if she lives for herself her life will be a failure.  By the time of the New Year ball, she has married Howard (Claude Rains), a successful banker; it’s immediately clear, of course, that this marriage is not a passionate relationship.  A few weeks after the ball, Stephen renews the relationship with Mary while her husband is abroad.   (It’s less than clear whether this is for a matter of days or weeks.)  On the point of leaving him for Stephen, Mary steps back again and stays with her husband.   The next meeting with Stephen in Switzerland, like the one at the ball, occurs by chance and there’s no suggestion that the relationship will be sustained beyond it:  Stephen himself is now married with two children.   Mary’s husband, however, files for divorce, and this triggers the film’s climax.  Mary is an unusual protagonist, given when the film was made – perhaps she would be unusual even now.  There’s nothing feminist about her desire for emotional autonomy:  she has no pretensions to being independent in any visible aspect of her life.  She rather wants the freedom to be self-centred.  Sexual activity or even sexual ambition doesn’t appear to be part of that freedom, except when Stephen appears and reappears on the scene.

The film yields up powerful ironies.  We realise that Mary and Howard are chilly kindred spirits – it’s completely believable when Howard says that he’s filed for divorce because Mary’s behaviour has caused him emotional turbulence with which he’s uncomfortable.  When Stephen describes his family life, we sense that he too has come to feel the attractions of an emotionally limited marriage.  Mary waves an impassioned goodbye to Stephen as a motorboat carries him away from her outside the hotel window in Switzerland – and there’s a startling sense that the parting is thrilling to her:  she can preserve the latest short meeting with Stephen in memory, without having to deal with the messy complications of a continuing relationship, until the next time their paths cross – which she can now believe they’re predestined to do.  Howard, who sits unseen behind her in the hotel room, doesn’t read her excited behaviour in this way.  What stops The Passionate Friends from being a masterpiece is a tendency to overemphasis, an occasional loss of nerve when the story takes a conventional route and Ann Todd’s limitations in the main part – even though it’s a fascinating piece of casting.  The first time that Howard dictates a business letter and its text is code for the emotional subtext of the moment is wonderfully done by Claude Rains and has great impact.  The effect is, however, dissipated by repetition.  (And there are smaller ironic details that David Lean pushes too hard – like the ‘Keep Smiling’ legend of the Guinness advertising poster that’s a backdrop to Mary’s suicide attempt in the London underground.)  After Howard has explained his convincing motivation for divorcing Mary, his announcement that he realises he’s now fallen in love with her rings false (and his knowing exactly where to find her so that he can pull her back from the jaws of an approaching tube train is laughable).

Ann Todd is quite lacking in fluidity:  we can see the effort in her emotional shifts (and her failure to convey these fully).   When, lying awake at night, Mary stares into the dark, knowing that her life has been the failure Stephen predicted, she conveys a kind of constipated unhappiness.  This may well emanate from Todd the actress but it fuses powerfully with the character she’s interpreting.  Her bloodless quality is, though, the cause of a crucial weakness in the material.  Trevor Howard (especially in the two lunch scenes with Mary) gives a fine performance as Stephen – and creates a more fully developed character than the doctor he played in Brief Encounter – but he can’t make you believe that clever, attractive Stephen, at ease with himself and with a capacity for contentedness, would be continually fascinated by Mary.  Claude Rains gives a subtle portrait of a man whose good-humoured, wary complacence develops into something more aggressively mean-spirited in defence of his half a loaf.   It’s a pity that he’s landed with the most melodramatic bits (including a puzzling visit to a theatre to view the empty seats he must know Mary and Stephen won’t be filling since she’s left their tickets at home for Howard to find there).

Isabel Dean is excellent in the fairly thankless role of Stephen’s girlfriend and eventual wife – especially when she dances with him at the New Year ball and we see her fixed smile and frightened eyes looking out for Mary as she whirls round the floor (although Lean maybe has one too many shots of Dean doing this).   Betty Ann Davies is the husband’s secretary.  Wilfred Hyde White has a cameo role as a divorce lawyer, in which he does amusing business fiddling with a pencil.  There are remarkable shots in the film:  at the New Year ball, as Mary and her husband look from a balcony to the revellers below;  the camera’s movement round the couple’s large house with its gelid parquet floors and adamantine pillars;  Mary’s and Stephen’s ascent through clouds to an almost heavenly picnic on the top of a Swiss alp.   The over-insistent music – the one element which makes the film-making seem antique – is by Richard Addinsell.  Based on a 1913 novel by H G Wells, The Passionate Friends was adapted from the screen first by Eric Ambler, then rewritten by Lean himself and Stanley Haynes.

12 June 2008