Celia Johnson

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Classic DVD: Brief Encounter (1945)

October 3, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard look longingly at one another. Noel Coward adapted the screenplay from his one-act 1936 stage drama, "Still Life."

One of film’s most beautiful and bittersweet romances, Brief Encounter is an adaptation of a Noel Coward stage play about the unconsummated affair between a married doctor and a bored housewife, both of whom feel an indescribable lack in their lives. A taut film by David Lean with none of the director’s late-career trademark sweep, this drama proves you don’t have to go very far to travel great distances.

Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), a suburban British housewife with a dependable husband and two handsome children, has a chance meeting with married doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) in a railroad tea shop. After another chance meeting, they begin to realize that they fill an emotional void in each other’s life, one that they had only suspected existed before they met. The couple spends several Thursdays together, enjoying lunch, seeing movies and running through the shadowy rail station to catch their trains so that their spouses won’t suspect their dalliance. But the warm glow of their “affair” soon turns dark. Down deep they realize that it’s not only their trains–but their lives–that are heading in opposite directions.

Lean is better known for his epics about great men trying to conquer the world, most notably Lawrence of Arabia. But if Brief Encounter doesn’t have T.E. Lawrence raging against every grain of sand in the desert, it has has a pair of mere mortals who rage just the same and their failure to change their own little worlds feels no less shattering. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

  • To learn about the current Broadway stage production of Brief Encounter, read the review by my former colleague, the excellent New York Post theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli.

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