John Bowen’s screenplay retains some of the dialogue of the original but in the new circumstances – Alec is given a 1970s interest in “environmental pollution” and Laura (now Anna) is set up as a Citizens’ Advice Bureau volunteer – it tends to sound merely old-fashioned. Sometimes this can intensify our viewing experience but not here. Intertextuality matters when we watch a film: we can’t put aside all the information we bring to bear on it. If you want to make a touching drama about love and renunciation in a quiet English setting (and director Alan Bridges could have been just the man for the job), you’d perhaps think twice about casting an international sex symbol and a noted lothario as the leads. The film’s most obvious – and most ludicrous – successor is the 1974 telemovie remake, improbably starring Sophia Loren and Richard Burton. The film is told in an extended flashback, and it has been suggested that it is no more than a dream on Laura’s part but even if that were so, it would not lessen its emotional power. Before this love can be consummated, they are interrupted by an unexpected arrival she runs to the station, Alec follows her, and the exchange quoted above takes place she then returns to her kind, rather conventional husband. In the station’s buffet, Dr Alec Harvey removes the fragment, and on subsequent meetings they fall in love. Middle-class housewife Laura, after a day’s shopping in her provincial town, is waiting for the train to take her home when a speck of grit from a passing train lodges in her eye. Still Life now seems utterly appropriate as a title for a play that is stiff with restraint, its confinement to a railway-station waiting room creating an airlessness at odds with the emotional resonance of the film.įor those unfamiliar with the 1945 film – the loss is theirs and should be quickly repaired – here is a very brief account of its narrative substance. The film’s origins were in Noël Coward’s one-act play, Still Life, part of his Tonight at 8.30 compendium first performed at the Phoenix Theatre, London, in 1936.
No doubt Brief Encounter had filmed predecessors, but I am concerned here with its successors, whether full-scale or in various – and multifarious – quotations across the media and beyond. But it dramatises a simple truth: that there is more to life than personal gratification – and it is this, perhaps, that accounts for the endless echoes the film has generated in the seventy-odd years since it was first screened.
Quoted out of context, this exchange between Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) and Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) in the 1945 romantic drama Brief Encounter may sound almost banal. Other things matter too, self-respect matters, and decency.