Brief Encounter (1945)

I would imagine everyone has had some kind of brief encounter in their lifetime.  I don't necessarily mean an affair.  But a time where you met someone and hit it off and wondered what if I had chosen that person instead of the person I'm currently with. Two brief encounters I recall were when I was back packing through Europe after college in 1987. I had a girlfriend (now my wife) back in the United States.  But I was traveling alone.  I would meet fellow backpackers at hostels and in trains and at tourist destinations.  There were times where I would feel a bit lonely for the opposite sex.  I met a young Australian woman at a hostel in Switzerland and we spent the day walking around the Lauterbrunnen Valley and taking a gondola to the top of the Schilthorn, a Swiss Alp.  I met another young South African woman at a hostel in Salzburg, Austria.  She was with a local girlfriend and I was with a gent from Detroit.  I like to think we hit it off.  She wanted me to stay another night at the hostel but I had my itinerary and Venice was my next stop.  In both occasions, they were nice attractive women and we seemed to hit it off.  But nothing occurred from it.  No indiscretion was pursued.  It was just companionship for a day in a foreign country.  My brief encounters would not make an interesting subject for a film.

But I was reminded of these brief encounters when director Richard Linklater came out with his BEFORE SUNRISE (1995) starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (and two subsequent sequels).  Similar to my experiences backpacking in Europe, Hawke meets Delpy on a train from Budapest to Vienna and they strike up a conversation.  Hawke convinces Delpy to spend the day with him walking around Vienna until late in the morning where they have to decide whether they want to spend more time with each other or not. It's a great premise which had me thinking, "Why didn't I think of that for a film idea?" Well, another filmmaker and playwright had.  The great David Lean, usually associated with epic films like THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI (1957) and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) began his career with small films, often based on plays by Noel Coward like BLITHE SPIRIT (1945) and BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945), one of the first important films of the post-war cinema.

Directed by David Lean with a screenplay by Noel Coward (with input by director Lean and producer Ronald Neame) based on Coward's one act play Still Life, BRIEF ENCOUNTER begins at the end of the story with our two tragic middle aged lovers housewife Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) final goodbye after a month long affair at the Milford Junction train station interrupted by Laura's gossipy friend Dolly Messiter (Everley Gregg).  Alec rushes off to catch his train. Laura rides the train home with Dolly and returns to her comfortable but bland house where her husband Fred Jesson (Cyril Raymond) waits for her while working on a crossword puzzle. As she sits in her chair by a fire, Laura's voice over remembers back on how she and Alec first met.  Every Thursday, Laura takes the train to Milford to shop, dine, and catch a movie.  While waiting to catch her train back home one Thursday evening, she gets some dust in her eye from a passing train. Alec, a general practicioner, offers to help and relieves her discomfort. It's a harmless first encounter.

The following week, they bump into each other on the street.   A week later, Laura  has one of the last seats at a diner for lunch.  Alec walks in and sees her. He sits down with her and they chat, get to know each other a little better.  The two of them end up going to catch a movie together at the cinema and then have tea at the Milford Train Tea Room before going home to their families. Alec asks if he can meet her again next Thursday. Laura excitedly agrees then feels guilty on the ride home, positive everyone can read her thoughts. She even tells Fred she met a nice doctor during her day but Fred barely listens. And so begins a series of brief encounters.

The next Thursday, Laura goes to the diner and walks by the hospital Alec works at but there's no sign of him. Only at the train station does he hurriedly show up, apologizing that  he was tied up at work all day.  But the next week, he's waiting for her.  They take a walk at a botanical garden and rent a row boat. Alec professes his love to her. The two lovers even steal a kiss on the train platform before they part. On the way home, Laura fantasizes about a different life with Alec, full of fancy dinners and elegant dress wear and ballroom dances.  But she snaps out of her fantasy as the train pulls into her station and she returns to Fred and her children.

The next time they meet, they run into a friend of Laura's Mary Norton (Marjorie Mars) who has observed them at the diner they both ate at. Laura lies again about her relationship with Alec, further adding to her guilt. Alec takes her on a car ride then back to a friend's flat he's borrowing for the night, a chance to consummate their love. But Alec's friend Stephen (Valentine Dyall) returns unexpectedly, scaring Laura who flees into the rain.  She calls Fred again and lies about her delay home. Waiting for the last train home, she tries to write a goodbye note to Alec.  Alec arrives and reaffirms his love for her but realizes that it's the beginning of the end of their affair. Alec reveals he's been offered a job in South Africa. They forgive each other for their indiscretion but agree to meet the following week one last time. On their last date, Laura and Alec take one final car ride, walk over their favorite stone bridge in the country, and sit in the train station's cafe a final time before they're interrupted by Dolly. Alec hastily leaves, Laura's last vision of the handsome doctor. When Dolly steps away for a moment, Laura almost throws herself in front of a passing train. But she resists and returns to Fred and her family.  Fred notices she's not herself and thanks her for coming back to him.

The train platform is a perfect setting for this doomed love affair in BRIEF ENCOUNTER.  Affairs, like a passing train, can be fleeting.  The steam emitting from the train's engines symbolize the growing passion these two strangers Laura and Alec begin to feel for one another. But other train sounds represent the hopelessness of this liaison.  A little bell rings in the cafe alerting that a train is pulling into the station, maybe Laura's or Alec's, signaling their blissful day or few hours of quiet romance must come to an end until next time. The train's whistle blows at dramatic moments. cutting short Alec and Laura's first kiss as if the train whistle is screaming to them stop this charade, it can never last. And yes, trains can represent a phallic symbol (see Alfred Hitchcock's last shot in NORTH BY NORTHWEST) but Laura and Alec's brief dalliance never becomes sexual although they come close when Alec brings Laura back to a friend's empty apartment.

Laura and Alec are not the only couple in love in BRIEF ENCOUNTER.  Writer Coward smartly offsets some of the sadness of Laura and Alec's affair with a comic parallel flirtation between train porter Albert Godby (Stanley Holloway) and train station cafe manager Myrtle Bagot (Joyce Carey). Albert and Myrtle are the flip side of Laura and Alec.  They flirt openly in front of everyone including Myrtle's Tea Room Assistant Beryl Walters (Margaret Barton). Albert asks her for a kiss in public and even playfully slaps her derriere. Albert and Myrtle are as public with their courting as Laura and Alec are private with their feelings for each other. The one thing the two couples have in common is they don't end up with one another at the end. But we don't feel so much anguish for Albert and Myrtle. They may come around eventually.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER would not be director David Lean's last film that involved trains. In THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI, Lean blows up a bridge with a huge locomotive on it. Lean will blow up another train, this time in the desert, in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.  And a train will take Omar Sharif and Julie Christie out of Moscow to Siberia in DR. ZHIVAGO (1965). BRIEF ENCOUNTER would not be Lean's last film about infidelity either.  Ten years later, Lean would direct SUMMERTIME (1955) starring Katherine Hepburn as a single American tourist who falls in love with the handsome but married Rossano Brazzi while vacationing in Venice, Italy. And it's a train that brings and takes Hepburn out of Venice. After SUMMERTIME, Lean would move on to epic films although some would have love stories within them. 

What makes BRIEF ENCOUNTER real are the two lead actors, neither of who were outwardly famous like a Bogart and Bacall or Gable and Leigh. Both Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard seem like ordinary middle aged people.  BRIEF ENCOUNTER is told from Laura's point of view. We see her situation, stuck in a rut with her nice but passive husband and two precocious kids.  But there's no fire in her marriage.  But Celia Johnson's big eyes come to life when a handsome doctor takes an interest in her.  Johnson's eyes reveal a new spark in her personality as she embarks on this illicit affair but her eyes will also reveal sadness and pain as she and Alec know their relationship will not last.  Celia Johnson was not well known to American audiences and had done more British theater than films. Besides BRIEF ENCOUNTER, Johnson also made THIS HAPPY BREED (1944) the previous year with David Lean and was a favorite actress of playwright Noel Coward. She's not a movie star beauty but Johnson is pretty with her vivacious face and those luminous eyes.

We know Trevor Howard now as one of Britain's dependable actors from the mid 40s thru the 80s appearing in films like Carol Reed's THE THIRD MAN (1949), as Captain Bligh in Lewis Milestone's MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1962), and co-starring with Frank Sinatra in Mark Robson's VON RYAN'S EXPRESS (1965).  But BRIEF ENCOUNTER was only Howard's third film and his first and possibly only role as a leading man.  Movie fans will never think of Trevor Howard as a romantic lead like Cary Grant but that's the point.  Like Celia Johnson, Howard's Dr. Alec Harvey is a more realistic, modest example of a perfectly married every day man who falls in love with a married woman. We see Laura's family life helping us to emphasize with her struggle to engage and maintain an affair. We never see Alec's wife or children, making him more of a mystery.  Is his marriage so horrible that he was driven to seek out an affair.  Or was it just by chance that he encounters Laura with accidental meetings at first and slowly falls in love with this very human, flawed woman. Howard's performance as Alec is restrained, gentle, and giddy at times (ironically the two lovers see a film called FLAMES OF PASSION, an in-joke by the filmmakers). 

The other notable supporting actors are British stalwart Stanley Holloway as train porter Albert Godby and Noel Coward favorite Joyce Carey as Myrtle Bagot, our comic diversions from the serious affair between Laura and Alec going on right next to them at the train station. Holloway was a singer and comic who played the gravedigger in Laurence Olivier's HAMLET (1948) then had a nice stretch of comic performances in Ealing Studio films like THE LAVENDER HILL MOB (1951) and THE TITFIELD THUNDERBOLT (1953). In BRIEF ENCOUNTER, Holloway plays a playful foil to Carey's Myrtle, flirting with her outrageously.  Holloway's most famous role would be as Alfred P. Doolittle (a role he performed first on the stage) in George Cukor's MY FAIR LADY (1964). 

Joyce Carey who plays Myrtle Bagot was actually a close friend of playwright Noel Coward and appeared in many of his plays as well as films he wrote including BLITHE SPIRIT and THE ASTONISHED HEART (1950) co-starring Celia Johnson. In BRIEF ENCOUNTER, Carey plays a comic busy body who manages the train station cafe, playfully bantering with porter Holloway as the films real love story unfolds around them.  A special mention should go to Cyril Raymond as Laura's nice but dull husband Fred Jesson. Fred could be portrayed as a horrible husband making it easier for the audience to understand Laura entering into an affair. But Fred is sympathetic, kind, just not particularly attune to his wife mid-life malaise.  In BRIEF ENCOUNTER'S last scene, Fred finally awakens to wife's pain, a moment almost as moving as Laura and Alec's final moments together.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER is considered one of the first and best post-war films.  Surprisingly, it was made while World War II was just winding down yet the war is never mentioned throughout the film. BRIEF ENCOUNTER is a realistic view of the highs and lows of the human heart as portrayed by two normal, every day English people.  It's a love story not often shown on the movie screen where the love is mercurial and cannot be sustained. Not all love stories have happy endings.  As in real life.