Synopsis:
Laura (Celia Johnson), a housewife, and Alec (Trevor Howard), a doctor, both happily married to other people, happen to fall in love with each other, quite by chance and apparently without calculation, after he removes a piece of grit from her eye. Friendship develops into romance, and the couple meet in town once a week before they finally call off their ‘affair’, which remains unconsummated. Their sense of duty towards their respective spouses and families, as well as their overwhelming need to behave in accordance with the accepted morality of the time, prevents them from taking their relationship any further. Instead, sexual passion is displaced by awkward conversation and furtive, loving glances at each other in the Milford Junction station tearoom or the Kardomah café.
Analysis:
Jeremy Paxman begins his book, The English: A Portrait of a People, with a detailed account of the Brief Encounter: a good indicator of just how far this film has become an icon not only of British cinema but also of British national identity, particularly in terms of the behaviour of its two lead characters. Raymond Durgnat proclaimed the motto of the film to be ‘Make tea not love’ (1971: 181). Durgnat further noted how the film that was critically lauded upon its 1945 release (even winning the Critics’ Prize at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival) met with quite a different reception 20 years later, when its ethos of restraint no longer seemed quite so appealing to the exponents of sixties free love, and the most innocuous little details of the film provoked impatience and irritation in its viewers. He recalls that at one screening he attended ‘Even the name of the town enraged a well-spoken young lady who finally cried out, “Where the hell is Milford Junction anyway?”’ (1971: 180).
However, the suggestion that the film did not meet with antipathy until the 1960s is slightly misleading, since even in the 1940s the film had a mixed reception. When it was first test-screened in a cinema in Kent that had a working-class clientele, it was heckled and laughed at throughout because of the (much parodied) middle-class speech of its protagonists, not to mention its unimpeachably ‘correct’ morality. Brief Encounter may be a national icon but from the moment of its initial release onwards there have been any number of iconoclasts who have called into question its ability to speak for them and their national identity. Perhaps the critic Gavin Lambert was correct when he called the film a ‘definitive document of middle-class repression’, the last word on a particular kind of Britishness, specific to a time and a place and most crucially a class. 1 Even within the film, we see the operation of a slightly different moral code via the parallel relationship between Myrtle (Joyce Carey), the station tearoom manageress and Albert (Stanley Holloway), the stationmaster, who belong to a different social class from Alec and Laura, and are less inhibited about acting on their feelings for each other.2
Brief Encounter was the fourth and final collaboration between the celebrated playwright Noel Coward and director David Lean, who would go on to make two of the most highly regarded adaptations of Dickens novels, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) before moving into epic mode with later films such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Having risen to the status of the top British film editor by the end of the 1930s, Lean had been asked to co-direct the war film In Which We Serve (1942) with Noel Coward, providing technical expertise to complement Coward’s ease with actors. The partnership proved highly successful and continued with Lean directing the family saga This Happy Breed (1944) and the supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit (1945), both adaptations of Coward’s stage successes. It is a sign of Lean’s growing confidence as a director that he encouraged Coward to rethink the chronological structure of his half-hour play Still Life, the source for Brief Encounter, when converting it into a screenplay. Lean told Coward that the original dramatic structure lacked intrigue and surprise. He suggested that the film version could play with audience expectation by beginning with an enigmatic scene showing the couple’s final parting:
“and then you go back and explain that this is the last time they see each other. They were never going to see each other again. And you play the first scene in the picture – it made no sense to you at all and you didn’t hear half the dialogue – again, and that’s the end of the film.” (Brownlow 1997: 194)
This strategy is highly effective, particularly as it comes at the film’s most emotionally extreme moment; Laura’s sudden suicidal impulse. In the first version, we remain in the tearoom with Myrtle and Laura’s friend Dolly (Everley Gregg) vaguely wondering where Laura has got to, before she reenters the room looking pale and shaky. In the second version, we go with Laura as she rushes out onto the platform determined to throw herself under the express train thundering past, and this time we understand the significance of the moment and know exactly why she has reached this abject state. She hesitates at the last moment and resists suicide, although as she admits in her voice-over narration (an imaginary confession to her husband, but also the key to the viewer’s intimacy and empathy with the character) that this is not because of a sense of duty towards her family but because she ‘wasn’t brave enough’ to go through with it.
Despite Lean’s important contribution to the film, in 1945 the film was sold as a Noel Coward film, and Andy Medhurst has read the film as an oblique expression of Coward’s homosexuality. The film’s forbidden relationship is heterosexual, but its depiction of ‘the pain and grief caused by having one’s desires destroyed by the pressures of social convention’ (1991: 204) could be understood as a coded reference to the tribulations of (then still illegal) homosexual relationships. Several decades on, Richard Kwietniowski’s short film Flames of Passion (1990) paid homage to Brief Encounter’s queer subtext by offering a gay reimagining of the original film. It even takes its title from the torrid melodrama that Alec and Laura go to see at the cinema, but which they leave halfway through because they find it too silly and implausible.
Brief Encounter’s ‘meta-cinematic’ elements (characters within the film commenting on films and the focus on aspects of 1940s cinema-going like the differently priced seats, the organist who plays beforehand, the trailers and Disney cartoon prior to the main film) are important reminders of the central role that fantasy plays in our lives; every small town has its cinema where people can spend a pleasant few hours inhabiting a cinematic dream world. However, Laura seems particularly prone to the lure of fantasy. She borrows romantic novels from the library and, as her husband Fred (Cyril Raymond) remarks, she is a ‘poetry addict’ able to fill in the missing word from his crossword puzzle, taken from a line from Keats (‘Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance’ – a phrase that could apply to Laura’s own romance, punctuated by clouds of steam and smoke from passing trains). Meanwhile for down-to-earth Fred, ‘romance’ is just ‘something in seven letters’ that fits in with ‘delirium’ and ‘Baluchistan’. Laura is the one who turns on the radio broadcast of Rachmaninov when she returns home from her final terrible meeting with Alec, and who uses the pounding dramatic Russian music as a soundtrack for her remembrance of her love affair, communicating the depth of her feelings where words fail.
Indeed, the emotive power of these elements of the film belie its reputation as a realist, restrained, repressed text, and, as Richard Dyer suggests, to see Brief Encounter ‘as only cups of tea, banal conversation and guilt is not really to see or hear it at all’ (1993: 66). Rather, it is precisely that interaction in the film between suburban mundanity – such as going to Boots to buy a toothbrush, eating a Banbury cake at a café – and overwhelming unexpected emotion – falling in love, wanting to die if one cannot be with one’s lover – that makes Brief Encounter so resonant. At one point Laura says, ‘I’m an ordinary woman – I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people’; but the film never lets us forget that beneath the surface of bland normality, unsuspected flames of passion flicker away; that in the imagination of a respectable middle-class housewife, the ‘pollarded willows by the canal just before the level crossing’ can be magically transformed into moonlit palm trees under which she embraces her lover. The film grants us privileged access into these suppressed dreams and brings them vividly to life while also recognising the impossibility of sustaining them in reality. ‘Whatever your dream was – it wasn’t a very happy one, was it?’ says a newly insightful Fred to Laura in the film’s final moments, and on the whole he is right, for her romantic idyll causes her more pain than pleasure. And yet Laura still wants ‘to remember every minute – always – always – to the end of my days’.
One final point, although it may not be immediately apparent to today’s viewer, the cinema-goer of 1945 would have recognised instantly that Brief Encounter was not a contemporary drama but set a few years earlier, pre-war. It carefully depicts a late 1930s milieu with pointed details like Laura and Fred being able to leave their curtains open with lights blazing (no blackout), trains running on time and no coupons required to buy items like chocolate. But there is more to Brief Encounter’s temporal shift than simple nostalgia for the luxuries of the recent past. As Antonia Lant has argued, a ‘contemporary audience member could view the film with a sense of historical superiority that appealed to his or her sense of place, knowing that the constructed epoch on the screen had a definite and catastrophic endpoint’ (1991: 170). Neither Alec nor Laura seem to realise that their affair is taking place in the larger historical context of the final days before the beginning of the Second World War, and there is an irony implicit in their renunciation of each other in favour of stability and continuity (‘One has one’s roots after all, hasn’t one?’, Dolly states, a sentiment with which Laura agrees, albeit rather half-heartedly) when the world is about to change immeasurably, and roots are about to be ripped up, no matter what they choose to do.
Melanie Williams
Notes
1. Gavin Lambert in conversation with Stephen Frears and Alexander Mackendrick, during Frears’s documentary Typically British: A Personal History of British Cinema, Channel Four/BFI, 1994.
2. It should be noted that the film’s use of working-class characters as little more than comic counterpoint to the more dignified and ‘important’ middle-class love affair has also attracted much criticism.
Cast and Crew:
[Country: UK. Production Company: Cineguild. Director: David Lean. Screenwriters: Noel Coward, David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan. Cinematographer: Robert Krasker. Editor: Jack Harris. Music: Sergei Rachmaninov. Cast: Celia Johnson (Laura Jesson), Trevor Howard (Dr Alec Harvey), Joyce Carey (Myrtle Bagot), Stanley Holloway (Albert Godby), Cyril Raymond (Fred Jesson).]
Further Reading:
Kevin Brownlow, David Lean, London, Faber, 1997.
Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England, London, Faber, 1971.
Richard Dyer, Brief Encounter, London, BFI, 1993.
Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991.
Andy Medhurst, ‘That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship’, Screen, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer 1991.
Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People, London, Penguin, 1999.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.