Original subtitles

(RUMBLING)

(TRAIN ROARS)

(TRAIN WHISTLE)

(RUMBLING)

# RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No.2

Brilliantly, daringly, heartbreakingly,

Brief Encounter begins with the end.

In a crowded platform cafe, there is talk everywhere.

But we are not listening to a word.

The camera closes in on a couple,

who don't appear to be speaking at all.

Their faces tell us everything.

(PLATFORM BELL CLANGS)

There's your train. Yes, I know.

DOLLY: Aren't you coming with us? No, I go in the opposite direction.

My practice is in Churley. Oh, I see.

I'm a general practitioner at the moment.

Dr Harvey's going to Africa next week.

Oh, how thrilling. TANNOY: '..platform four is the 5:40

for Churley, Leigh Green and Langdon.'

We are constantly told by the characters

how ordinary they are - their lives are ordinary.

Yet he's a doctor, a handsome doctor,

and she's this beautiful woman.

And the film gets to have it both ways.

They are movie stars.

They are tremendously attractive.

They are full of the glamour of the big screen,

yet they are also representing middle-class lives.

And you can see it both ways and feel it both ways.

You know, that famous line that Celia Johnson says about

not knowing that such violent things happen to such ordinary people.

And the way that it is filmed,

especially in, you know, in their kind of love affair,

or quasi love affair, you know, when they go rowing in a boat,

and they have these moments - they go to the cinema together.

These are really beautiful cinematic moments

that do have a touch of glamour to them as well.

I must go. Yes, you must.

Goodbye. Goodbye.

(TRAIN BRAKES SCREECH)

(TRAIN WHISTLE SHRIEKS)

(SUSTAINED SHRILL WHISTLE)

(TRAIN RUMBLING)

(RUMBLING FADES)

# RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No.2

As Alec and Laura, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson

are whispering their final farewell -

two married people, who have met by chance

and fallen desperately in love.

They are doing the right thing.

The film is all the more tragic because of it.

The greatness of Brief Encounter lies in these human contradictions -

duty versus passion,

decency versus desire,

the head versus the heart.

(ROMANTIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

Do you think we shall ever see each other again?

I don't know. Not for years anyway.

The children will all be grown up.

I wonder if they'll ever meet and know each other.

Couldn't I write to you, just once in a while?

No, Alec, please. You know we promised.

Well, alright, dear,

I do love you, so very much.

I love you with all my heart and soul.

I want to die.

If only I could die.

If you died, you'd forget me.

I want to be remembered.

Yes, I know. I do too.

It's one of those film and sets of performances

that is very easy to caricature -

and in fact has been caricatured many, many times.

But it's impossible to emulate.

And the reason is because of the truth of those performances

and the unbelievable sort of accuracy

of the social conventions that they are bound by.

There isn't a false note in this film from start to finish.

(SOMBRE ROMANTIC MUSIC)

(THINKS) 'Fred.

Fred.

Dear Fred.

There's so much that I want to say to you.

You're the only one in the world

with enough wisdom and gentleness to understand.

If only it were somebody else's story and not mine.

As it is, you're the only one in the world that I can never tell.

Never, never.

Because even if I waited until we were old, old people

and told you then,

you'd be bound to look back over the years and be hurt.

And, oh, my dear, I don't want you to be hurt.'

Celia Johnson of course,

right in the middle of it, right at the heart of it,

confessing all to her husband in her head,

who is about as heartbreaking as a human being can be,

you know, without actually falling apart on screen.

She's so wonderful in it.

There is absolutely no doubt at all

why Coward and Lean wanted her.

Absolutely superb performance -

unmatched, I would say, in British cinema.

Because it's so beautifully detailed

and is so understated.

The way she says, "I want to die.

Why can't I die?", at the end,

you go... (GASPS)

You know, and you think it's...

it's skipped over,

and yet you know she really means it.

Very few people could get away with that.

# RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No.2

(UPBEAT NEWSREEL MUSIC)

NORTH AMERICAN NEWSREADER: 'School opening means evacuation

for more thousands of London children,

and despite the long recess from Adolf Hitler's object lessons,

the city hasn't had a raid in months.

But authorities demand that even hardened campaigners

go to the country, just in case.

Back in London, there are thousands of children who won't go.

They use the new playgrounds the Nazis made

when they killed thousands of children last school year.'

Though the film was written in 1936,

and is set approximately in the late-'30s,

the privations and sacrifices of World War II bleed into the drama.

This is a story about doing the right thing,

whatever the temptation, whatever the cost.

Though far more internalised, there is an echo of Casablanca.

Standing by your man would have had far more weight

when the film was released.

Women would have seen themselves in Laura.

The film's title, Brief Encounter,

is really the product of Noel Coward looking at what they'd done -

they'd taken a year's story and compressed it

into a brief period of time, into a few weeks.

And he said, "Well, this is very brief."

And one of his assistants said, "It should be Brief Encounter."

This is something that, particularly in World War II,

with soldiers home on leave for brief moments of romance,

the idea of a brief encounter

was very much in the culture at that particular point.

It was a common slang phrase. So that worked really well.

And for 1944, I think, very radical

that what it's about is

you may get married, as Celia Johnson's character has,

and you may be happily married.

That doesn't mean to say that desire no longer exists,

that you might meet someone on a railway platform -

and desire springs up again.

And we all might experience that.

It's a message to everyone that she's not unique

and Trevor Howard isn't unique.

That idea of who human beings are.

We're complicated creatures.

Yes, and I think part of both the casting

and the sort of framing of the film - of these people being ordinary -

is such a key part of that because it's,

you know, leaning into this idea of

the people that were watching these films could go,

"Oh, I see something of myself in that," even if it's just glimmers.

And David Lean later said that part of the reason

that British audiences loved the film so much was because

they did see something they felt was real on the screen.

And I mean I think that's the crux of it, ultimately.

Directed by David Lean, cinema's great romantic,

and written by Noel Coward,

this is a love story about unfulfilled love,

a film lit up by two peerless performances

that describe an entire world beneath the surface -

a film that was radical for its day, and has grown into

one of the most celebrated and debated romances ever made:

an attempt to decipher what it means to be in love.

(TRAIN WHISTLE) ALBERT: I'll have to be moving.

The 5:40 will be in in a minute.

MYRTLE: Who's on the gate? Young William.

(TRAIN CHUGGING)

(RATTLING)

(TRAIN WHISTLE)

(RATTLING FADES)

(TRAIN RATTLING)

(TRAIN WHISTLE)

(SUSTAINED RATTLING)

Oh, please, could you give me a glass of water?

I've got something in my eye and I want to bathe it.

Would you like me to have a look? Oh, no, don't trouble.

I expect the water will do. Thank you.

A bit of coal dust, I expect.

A man I knew lost the sight in one eye

through getting a bit of grit in it.

Nasty, very nasty. Better?

I'm afraid not. Ooh! Can I help you?

Oh, no, please, it's only something in my eye.

Try pulling your eyelid down as far as it'll go.

And then blow your nose. Please let me look.

I happen to be a doctor. Oh, that's very kind of you.

Turn round to the light, please.

Now look up.

Now look down.

Keep still. I see it.

There. Oh, what a relief.

It was agonising. Looks like a bit of grit.

From when the express went through. Thank you very much.

(PLATFORM BELL) There we go. I must run.

How lucky for me you were here. Anybody could have done it.

Never mind, you did, and I'm most grateful.

There's my train, I must go. Goodbye.

Goodbye. TANNOY: '..Leigh Green and Langdon.'

The film is set in the fictional London suburb of Milford.

The crucial scenes were shot here at Carnforth Station in Lancashire.

And for dramatic reasons -

this was 1944,

when the peril of Nazi bombs still loomed large,

and, in particular, the V1 and V2 rockets aimed at Greater London.

So Lean and his production came north - officially evacuees -

to shoot on the platforms

and in the iconic cafe here at Carnforth.

The steam trains flying past the platforms

become a symbol of the fleeting nature of Alec and Laura's love.

I think it's hard for us to imagine today

the stresses and dangers of being in a film crew

whilst Britain was under siege,

particularly southern Britain, from V2 Nazi bombs.

And so, when the entire production was actually relocated to Lancashire

for safer filming,

that kind of affected the trajectory and the locations

of the film that was going to be made.

And in fact the Carnforth Train Station

was considered by the Ministry of War

to be out enough of the range of the V2 bombers

that they could have the lights on in the evening

and sort of get around the national blackouts

that were happening at the time.

They assumed that would be safe for them.

But the actual station, plot-wise,

is meant to be suburban London, isn't it?

It's not set in the north.

Yeah, there are these kind of geographical gaps in the film

in the way that there are also kind of temporal gaps.

You get the sense that whatever the humdrum kind of vision

of this suburban town is in the daytime, for instance,

at nighttime it kind of becomes something else

and becomes quite a dramatic dream space.

And that is largely because we're seeing this

through the flashback of a lovelorn woman.

And so it's sort of heightened in that way as well.

So it kind of creates this almost dream space around the station.

Having risen out of being an editor, David Lean was on his way

to becoming Britain's most illustrious director.

Indeed, Brief Encounter is one of his most important films,

but it was also made in a fruitful partnership

with the great playwright Noel Coward.

Their company, Cineguild Productions,

could be compared to The Archers

of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger fame.

Drawing deep from their times,

Lean and Coward made the war classic

In Which We Serve

and the social drama This Happy Breed with Celia Johnson,

and sparkling comedy Blithe Spirit.

They married an instinct for the grandeur of cinema

with a study of Britishness.

David Lean had entered the British film industry

from a very early age - the age of 17.

He joined Gaumont British Pictures first as a tea boy,

then worked his way up to clapper boy,

until finally getting in to the role of editor.

He became a very, very good editor.

He was very distinguished.

He worked with a lot of very important people

- Anthony Asquith, Michael Powell - and it was at that time

that he was probably thinking about making the move into direction.

He made Brief Encounter. David Lean had been working his way up

through the film industry, but he'd specialised

for a long time in editing. So he'd come in,

essentially as a clapper boy, become an editor -

and he was so good at editing that he became, in the 1930s,

the highest paid editor in British cinema.

It was something that he loved. He thought that editing was an art -

that he knew how to pick the right framing, the right scene,

how to emphasise the actors' qualities.

And so in fact, for the rest of his career,

he insisted on having the final edit.

That was really where he made his films - in the editing room.

But by the time we get to Brief Encounter,

he had started to develop as a director.

He'd worked on his first three movies,

all of them with Noel Coward.

Noel Coward had spotted his talents as an editor,

got him initially to co-direct with him

and then eventually handed over the directing duties to him.

So tell me something about the relationship

between Noel Coward and David Lean,

certainly, in the early part of Lean's career,

and certainly in the creation of Brief Encounter.

Coward was a very established and well-known playwright in the 1930s

and David Lean was at the beginning of his career.

So when Coward had the idea for his first feature film,

In Which We Serve, which he also starred in in part,

he approached Lean and had him come in as co-director.

And that would be both of their first screen credits as directors.

But this created a sort of mutual creative organisation

really between them - a production company.

Yes. They created a production company together.

In Which We Serve was quite successful,

both critically and commercially.

And they followed it up with three more films,

based on either plays of Coward's,

or, in the case of Brief Encounter, a one-act play.

And so Coward became the kind of writing force

behind Lean's direction.

Brief Encounter began as Still Life,

an idea all but plucked out of the air by Noel Coward.

Lean had been toying with a period piece in Mary Tudor,

when Coward informed him that he knew nothing about costumes.

Ten days later, Coward returned

and pitched him the script for Still Life,

about a couple who meet at a train station,

fall in love and then part.

But Lean was unimpressed.

It had no surprises.

Lean made the single brilliant suggestion

that would transform the drama of Still Life

into the masterpiece of Brief Encounter.

Without explanation, you start with the end.

The film would then be Laura's recollections of events

that would bring the audience full circle to the scene again,

but from her perspective.

Suddenly, the film was about memory and sacrifice.

(INTRICATE PIANO MUSIC)

LAURA: 'That's how it all began.

Just through me getting a little piece of grit in my eye.

I completely forgot the whole incident.

It didn't mean anything to me at all.

At least I didn't think it did.'

(TRAIN CHUGGING)

'The next Thursday, I went into Milford again as usual.'

(FLOWING PIANO MUSIC)

The play was about a doomed love affair between Alec and Laura,

two middle-class people who meet by accident in a railway-station cafe.

The extraordinary thing about this is that

it is just all set in the cafe,

and yet the essence of what was to become Brief Encounter

is all there.

Every single bit of dialogue that is in the play,

which is 25 minutes long,

actually finds its way into the film.

What Lean and Coward and indeed Havelock-Allan did

- because they all contributed to the script -

was open it up,

keeping the essential idea

of this doomed romance intact,

but drew in from the outside other characters,

Laura's husband, her home life,

their external ventures into the park

and various restaurants.

And yet it still, at the same time,

it sort of spins around, pivots around this central scene

in this railway-station cafe.

There's something interesting about how Lean reacted to Still Life,

in the sense that...

a little bit of a power game maybe with Noel Coward.

But also, he made it cinematic, didn't he?

And it's all about structure.

Absolutely. I think Lean had a really natural sense

of kind of structure from his time as a film editor,

and he was very interested in the portrayal of time in films,

and dissolves and that sort of thing.

And so when he looked at the content of this play,

he thought it was brilliant and that Noel Coward

had this incredible economy of language and dialogue.

It was essentially the story that we know as Brief Encounter,

about this nearly romance, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely.

It's essentially the same thing about

these wayward, both married, middle-class people,

who have a chance encounter

on a train-station platform

in a refreshment room.

And, you know, one is a doctor and one is a housewife,

and how they will never let themselves go

beyond the realms of impropriety,

exactly in this incredibly kind of beautiful

but unconsummated affair that they have.

LAURA: 'Just as I stepped out onto the pavement...'

Good morning. Oh, good morning.

How's the eye? Perfectly alright.

How kind it was of you to take so much trouble.It was nothing.

It's clearing up, I think. Yes, it's going to be nice.

Well, I must be getting along to the hospital.

And I must be getting along to the grocer's.

What exciting lives we lead, don't we?

BOTH: Goodbye.

The plot is at once simple and deeply complex.

These two people meet by chance

when he, a doctor, plucks a mite of coal dust from her eye.

She won't see clearly again for six weeks.

They will meet again and again,

random encounters becoming deliberate meetings.

They have fallen in love,

but we already know that it will not last.

LAURA: 'Just after I'd given my order, I saw him come in.

He looked a little tired, I thought,

and there was nowhere for him to sit, so I smiled and said...'

Good morning.

Oh, good morning.

Are you all alone? Yes, I am.

Would you mind if I shared your table? It's very full.

There doesn't seem to be anywhere else.No, of course not.

(QUIRKY ORCHESTRAL FILM MUSIC)

(MELODRAMATIC FILM MUSIC)

(HIGH-PITCHED SCREAM) (CLAMOURING)

(DRAMATIC FANFARE)

(LOUNGE MUSIC PLAYS)

Both Lean and Coward were set on Celia Johnson as Laura.

A good part, she said, got her itching,

and she knew this was a good part.

However, she hated making films.

That resistance, in part, is what made her so perfect.

So much of the film is located in the landscape of her face -

a symphony of happiness and anguish.

She imagines she is confessing it all to her decent husband,

but she is telling the story to herself.

Her mellifluous, unhappy interior monologue

carries us through the film.

(RACHMANINOV CONCERTO SWELLS)

Now, this film would be nothing without the two lead actors,

essentially, and as Celia Johnson...

Just give me an idea of what she's like as an actress

and why you can't imagine Brief Encounter without her.

Celia Johnson sort of holds the film together

and the close-ups on her are just such an economical

filmmaking technique that is so incredibly powerful.

She's got these huge, extraordinary eyes,

and she maintains this very kind of cut-glass accent

and this kind of physical uprightness.

You can kind of see her poise and her sense of dignity.

But you also see that she's crumbling.

You hear in her voice that she's crumbling

and there's a real anguish that kind of runs through -

runs really deep through her character.

All good doctors must primarily be enthusiasts.

They must, like writers and painters and priests,

they must have a sense of vocation -

a deep-rooted, unsentimental desire to do good.

Yes, I see that.

Obviously, one way of preventing disease

is worth 50 ways of curing it. That's where my ideal comes in.

Preventive medicine isn't anything to do with medicine at all, really.

It's concerned with conditions.

Living conditions and hygiene and common sense.

For instance, my speciality is pneumoconiosis.

Oh, dear.

Don't be alarmed. It's simpler than it sounds.

It's nothing but a slow process of fibrosis of the lung

due to the inhalation of particles of dust.

In the hospital here, there are splendid opportunities

for observing cures and making notes because of the coal mines.

You suddenly look much younger.

Do I?

Almost like a little boy.

What made you say that?

I don't know.

Yes, I do.

Tell me.

We think that accent as being her normal vocal tones,

but her daughter has said she didn't use that accent at all in real life.

She was acting all the way through

with this particular cut-glass class-based accent.

So she was inhabiting that role in this incredibly modern way.

You could almost see her as being close to a method actor.

The camera is inches away from her face

for the vast majority of the film.

I mean, in a way, the film is really

a set of close-ups of Celia Johnson.

Probably over half of the film, if not more,

is really just close up on her face.

There's a critical scene in Brief Encounter -

it's possibly the most essential scene of the movie.

Trevor Howard is talking about his passion as a doctor

and how he is very, very engaged by particular diseases of the lungs.

And in that moment, as he finishes, Celia Johnson says,

"You look very young when you were talking."

And you can see her eyes switch.

And at that moment, she falls in love with him.

Now, that HAS to happen,

because the whole film is based on this hugely accelerated romance

and on the fact that these two people

are prepared to risk everything.

If you don't believe that she's in love with him

in that very brief period of time, the film doesn't work.

But she does it without ever explaining to the camera

what's happening at that moment. But you see that scene,

and you see her fall in love in a way that

I don't think I've ever seen before or since -

the very visible moment that a person falls in love with someone.

Roger Livesey had been Lean's first choice for Alec,

but when the director saw The Way To The Stars,

he was struck by this little-known actor

in a small part.

With his deep, soothing voice,

Trevor Howard's delivery of lines hinted at buried truths.

There is something controlled about the decency of the good doctor,

as if his passion was a sickness he cannot cure.

The film wouldn't work quite as well without Trevor Howard of course,

because he is the perfect partner

for Celia Johnson in this.

He's quiet, he's civilised,

he's got a sort of hidden passion inside him,

which comes out in what he does.

He's an idealist as a doctor.

Trevor Howard had been invalided out of the army relatively recently.

He was making his way as an actor.

The Way To The Stars was his first film,

so he was very much an unknown.

But there was something about him in that rough cut

that David Lean saw and realised this is the man I need

for the role of Dr Alec Harvey. He went after him.

Initially they struggled because Trevor Howard hadn't opened his post

and hadn't got the letter saying he'd been offered the role.

But when he finally turned up and delivered the role,

there was something about the way

that he connected with Celia Johnson that was absolutely perfect.

Lean loved to work with actors to bring out the subtle gestures

that say so much more than dialogue.

Both actors are superlative

in expressing the emotional turmoil beneath the surface

in clipped speech, brief touches, in haunted looks.

Yet screened chemistry is ultimately a mystery.

Why is it we believe in this romance so fully?

(PIANO TRIO STRIKES UP)

(Will you just look at the cellist?)

(LAUGHS) It really is dreadful, isn't it?

But we oughtn't to laugh. They might see.

There should be a society

for the prevention of cruelty to musical instruments.

You don't play the piano, I hope? I was forced to as a child.

You haven't kept it up? No. My husband isn't musical at all.

Good for him. For all you know,

I might have a tremendous burning professional talent.

Oh, dear, no. Why are you so sure?

You're too sane and uncomplicated.

The central passion builds across

secret afternoons at the pictures or boating in the park,

involves two middle-class people -

housewife and GP.

They are comically contrasted with another romance -

between the duo of salty ticket collector Stanley Holloway

and haughty cafe manageress Joyce Carey.

Both are evidently working class,

though Carey is a stickler for proper behaviour.

David Lean and Noel Coward steal a trick from Shakespeare

for this film - steal it really from A Midsummer Night's Dream,

where you have the rude mechanicals

who act out a slightly farcical play,

which mirrors the troubles of the lead characters

on either side of them. It's a play within a play.

And in the case of Brief Encounter,

you have the porter and the woman who runs the refreshment room

who are mimicking in a strange way the romance of our lead couple.

Minnie hasn't touched her milk. Did you put it down for her?

Yes, but she never came for it.

Fond of animals? In their place.

My landlady has got a positive mania for animals.

She's got two cats, one Manx, one ordinary,

three rabbits in a hutch in the kitchen

- they belong to her little boy by rights -

and one of those daft-looking dogs with hair over its eyes.

I don't know to what breed you refer.

(GUFFAWS) I don't think it knows itself.

The thing to bear in mind is that

almost no-one involved in making this film

had lived the life they were portraying.

So Noel Coward was a closeted gay man.

David Lean grew up with Quakers.

His dad left home when he was young.

You know, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey -

these people were not middle-class doctors and the wives of bankers.

Really, the only person who had any experience of this life

was Celia Johnson.

But she had deliberately gone into acting

because she thought it was something wicked.

So this is a performance of Englishness

created by a group of people who had never experienced

the life they were showing you.

And I think that's critical to understanding

why this film is incredibly successful internationally.

Because it isn't as English as we think.

It's a film that really connects with America.

It connects with America

so much so that it's nominated for three Oscars,

but also it really inspires American filmmakers.

So Billy Wilder created The Apartment

based on the apartment scene in Brief Encounter,

which is where Alec borrows his friend Stephen's flat

and invites Celia Johnson back.

Billy Wilder found that so intriguing

that he developed an entire movie based on that small sequence.

The script is an astonishing example

of Coward's gift for the nuance of life.

Handed new scenes by Lean,

Coward would tell the team to have their pencils ready,

then pace the room pouring out the dialogue.

There is no such thing as ordinary, or as he puts it "provincial" life.

There is something of himself in the screenplay - and Lean too.

This idea of a story coming close the brink of the forbidden.

As Laura says, she and Alec are in danger.

This is a film about the madness of falling madly in love.

Despite its reputation as a masterwork of repression,

the film is very funny.

Absurdity runs on parallel tracks to the sweeping romance,

as if fate is conspiring against them.

The film they go to see is called Flames Of Passion.

When boating, they become entangled in the weir.

Their voices are constantly drowned out

by the busybodies who cross their path.

(ORGAN PLAYED WITH GUSTO)

It can't be!

It is.

(BOTH LAUGH)

And it's very much a David Lean theme - isn't it? -

this idea of what leads up to romance -

the nearness of romance,

the tragedy of romance.

He's an intensely romantic filmmaker right across the board.

Yet I think what he's fascinated in

is "the almost", rather than the actual affair.

I wouldn't like to sort of pin biography

to somebody's film-making career too closely,

but the fact that David Lean was married and separated six times

maybe suggests something about "the almost" in his work.

But a lot of his characters straight through his career

are kind of yearners and dreamers about romance.

But the idea is often better than the reality.

One of the genius elements of David Lean's

sort of transformation of Coward's story

is to make it so much from Laura's point of view.

So it's sort of a woman's picture.

And we're led completely by her -

her love and her convictions about what's right.

And that means - in the classic propaganda film,

almost Casablanca sense - that you need to not worry so much

about following your own wild desires and be responsible,

but to have a moral responsibility to do the right thing,

and to, you know, return to the status quo.

And I think that was quite a powerful message at a time when,

you know, women - during the war - were separated from their husbands

and their sweethearts for a long period of time.

Men were away,

and things happen, probably on both sides,

things happen - there were affairs.

But Brief Encounter kind of does say,

or at least its characters believe, you know,

go back, go back to Fred, your boring husband,

go back to the children. You know, there's this kind of

real old-fashioned Englishness about respectability.

Between Lean's impeccable eye

and the genius of cinematographer Robert Krasker,

suburban Britain is transformed into a film noir.

The gusts of dreamlike steam,

the long shadow on the walls of the subway

and the veils of cigarette smoke

are a way of visualising the emotional trauma.

Krasker would of course later shoot The Third Man,

and you can see the connection.

One of the most successful elements of this film is the cinematography.

This by the great Robert Krasker,

who had been in films first as a camera operator

since the early-'30s,

and he'd worked with the greats, including Alexander Korda,

oddly enough, in Technicolor film, in the late-'30s.

So he's kind of gone back into black and white here.

What's fascinating about him is he carries with him in this

a sense of expressionism and noir.

Much of this film, certainly all the stuff

that's shot in the station, is shot at night.

And so you've got all those kind of shadows

and, you know, dark alleys and bridges,

which they have to sort of go under,

which is a sort of classic trope of film noir, in a way.

It won't surprise anyone to learn that, in fact,

this was his introduction to this kind of movie,

and he then went on to make Odd Man Out,

and finally The Third Man.

And there are elements in Brief Encounter

which directly relate to The Third Man.

And you can see everything - everything he does in that -

sort of reaches its full fruition in Carol Reed's masterpiece.

# RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No.2

No, Alec, not here. Someone will see.

I love you so.

(TRAIN CHUGGING)

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

FRED: Do you think we might turn that down a bit, darling?

Hi, Laura!

# RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No.2

Yes, dear?

You were miles away.

Was I? Yes, I suppose I was.

Do you mind if we turn that down a little?

It really is deafening. No, of course not.

The film is beautifully constructed around the theme of time.

There is never enough of it.

These are Laura's memories,

six weeks that have changed her forever.

The romance is glimpsed in stolen lunchtimes, afternoons

or gloomy British evenings.

They are urged on by train timetables,

the shrill call of whistles,

closing time at the cafe -

never having the time to say what they feel.

And there's also this terrific use of Rachmaninov

as a wonderful piece of music,

but somehow symbolic of the turmoil beneath the surface.

I think the Rachmaninov is very well deployed

in that it's quite an overpowering piece of music.

It's very kind of dramatic piano music.

But it never does overpower the scenes

because you first hear it through a radio,

so this is actually Laura's taste.

This is, you know, something that she would herself be listening to.

And so, once again, it kind of plays

as a piece of her memory or a piece of her interior life

that she would then be in retrospect applying that piece of music

over the top of these stolen moments that she's had with this man.

# RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No.2

The critics of 1945, when the film was released,

were overwhelming in their praise.

Though the distributor Rank had feared

it would only play to middle-class audiences,

the film was a hit right across the country.

David Lean was nominated for an Oscar as best director

and the screenplay would also be recognised.

Over the years, the film would be endlessly debated

and is now rightly adored as a classic.

David Lean would never really make a film quite like this again.

This is largely, I think,

due to the group around him,

and Coward, especially.

The first thing is that he didn't...

You know, it's very tightly focused, very tightly focused.

Of course there are peripheral characters in it,

all of whom are wonderful.

But the main focus is Celia Johnson.

I mean, even Trevor Howard takes second fiddle to her.

But... And it's her unbelievably luminous face and her eyes

which will tell you the story,

even without the dialogue, and the dialogue's absolutely superb.

So that is unusual in itself.

But it's because it has a delicacy and an intimacy and a sort of...

It's a reduction into...

..a really tight focus,

that was against Lean's basic idea.

Lean worked on, you know...

wanted to work on a big canvas, on a grand canvas,

and of course eventually did. When you think of David Lean,

you think of sort of huge, wonderful, expansive things

like Lawrence Of Arabia.

But the fact is that he did a marvellous job of this

because he understood detail.

He understood the way that people interact

and the way of actually getting them to do it.

What he's done is he's created

an epic love story,

a doomed love story, in miniature.

That's what this is.

And that's why they use Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No.2,

which is this sort of soaring, grand scheme.

It's sort of almost ironic to use that,

because of course it isn't. It isn't.

It's a small, little romance.

But is it? It's not.

It shows that, you know, ordinary people

can have those dreams of passion, can have those grand dreams.

It's just that they are constrained

by society and social conventions.

Brief Encounter is not only one of the great British romances,

it's one of the most enduring British films of all time.

But it is not a love story in the traditional movie sense.

It expresses a penetrating truth

about the complexity of love that few films ever have.

The all-consuming power, the excitement

and the devastating consequences.

The film is a psychological enquiry years ahead of its time.

And to send an audience away

unfulfilled, yearning and dreaming and wondering,

I think it's a very powerful tool.

It's sort of an unusual tool, you know.

Tied-up films, they're tied in a bow

and happy ending and we're all happy.

This is a film that sends you out and you're just left

to wonder and ponder and think about it forever.

I think the kind of melancholy - romantic melancholy -

and the what-if is such a huge part of the romantic imagination

and the romantic cinematic imagination as well.

It's certainly a big part of David Lean's

kind of reason for being in his films.

There's a real sensibility around this kind of yearning.

Brief Encounter has sometimes been called the British Casablanca,

which perhaps isn't completely accurate,

but certainly has that similar sting in its tail at the end,

where you're not really getting the coupling off that you hope for,

but you understand the reason - and it leaves you with something

a little bit more long-lasting and valuable.

# RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No.2

(PENSIVE MUSIC)

LAURA: 'That's when I nearly fainted.'

The implication of the film is that

you must not allow your personal feelings, passions,

to sacrifice the greater good.

In other words, you know, you've got a sense of duty,

either as a parent or a husband or wife,

to the family, but also to society as a whole.

For Celia Johnson, for Laura,

there is the sense that the ending,

the departure of her would-be lover,

is actually the only outcome she can tolerate.

In a way, Laura is swept up

by a passionate torrent that's completely outside her control.

She is caught in the headlamps of this man's gaze

and his words, his passion, his youth,

and she's completely out of control. She's fighting desperately

to keep a hold of some sense of propriety of herself,

of the woman who's married to her husband

and happy there with her two children.

She says at the very beginning of the film,

"You're the only person," to her husband,

"You're the only person I could talk to about this,

although I can never tell you." And that means

that there is something absolutely right about him.

He is the only person she could ever talk to

about this incident in her life.

So there is an incredibly strong bond between them.

He is someone who is more than just a boring, bumptious,

crossword-puzzle-doing fool.

And the fact that he understands everything that's happened,

we get this sense... One of the last things he says is,

"You've been a very long way away. Thank you for coming back to me."

And we briefly think, "Well,

maybe he knew everything all along."

But there's something between them, which is right.

He will accept that. He will accept what she had to do

and he will welcome her back without judgement.

So, in a way, that is a happy ending.

It is Brief Encounter that made David Lean famous.

It is a revelation of his cinematic talent -

this audacious structure of flashbacks

and flashbacks within flashbacks,

those mesmerizingly restrained performance

and those sublime visuals.

Looking back across his storied career,

famed for its scope and scale,

Brief Encounter is an epic of the human heart.

# RACHMANINOV: Piano Concerto No.2

Laura.

Yes, dear?

Whatever your dream was,

it wasn't a very happy one, was it?

No.

Is there anything I can do to help?

Yes, Fred, you always help.

You've been a long way away.

Yes.

Thank you for coming back to me.

(SOBS)

(RACHMANINOV CONCERTO SWELLS)

Subtitles by Sky Access Services www.skyaccessibility.sky