Brief Encounter/ David Lean, 1945

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“The imposing epics of David Lean’s later years sometimes threaten to overshadow the director’s relatively modest early works, but the focus too much on the sheer spectacle of Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago would be overlook some of Lean’s greatest accomplishments. After all, only a filmmaker of the highest order could direct Lawrence of Arabia, and that same mastery of the form is on display in Lean’s formative films.

Lean had already directed three adaptations of Noel Coward’s work when he began Brief Encounter, based on Coward’s one-act play Still Life.

But the play’s brevity forced Lean to expand the material, and in the process he expanded his own film vocabulary as well. Told in the flashback, Brief Encounter follows the platonic landscape love affair between housewife Laura (Celia Johnson) and doctor Alec (Trevor Howard), who meet fortuitously in a train station. There’s obviously a connection between the two, but they know their romance can’t go beyond a few furtive lunch meetings.

In crafting one of the most effective tearjerkers in cinema history, lean made a number of formal advances that quickly established him as more than just someone riding the coattails of Noel Coward. For starters Lean took the story out of the train station, adding more details to the doomed affair. And he exploited all the cinematic tools at his disposal; the lighting, fir example, approaches the severe look of Lean’s subsequent Dickens adaptations, making the symbolic most of the dark, smoky station. He also makes good use of sound effects (particularly that of the speeding train), as well as music, incorporating Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 as the film’s running theme.

But most importantly, Lean includes frequent close-ups of Johnson’s eyes, which tell better story than most scripts. She and Howard are superlative in this saddest of stories, their every movement steeped in meaning and the sterling dialogue laced with deep emotions. A passing glance, the brush of a finger across a hand, and the shared laugh are virtually all these ill-fated lovers are allowed, and Johnson and Howard beautifully convey this sad

realization.” (JKI)

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