A Not So Brief Encounter

This week Brief Encounter celebrates its eightieth anniversary. A lot of the credit for its extraordinary longevity belongs to its producer Tony Havelock-Allan, although when I interviewed him back in 2000 my abiding memory was of a man who was far too modest to make any great claims for himself. Even when he did take credit for something, he managed to do so in a self-deprecating way. So the title, for example:

We didn’t know what to call the film. Still Life was obviously no good. We got as far as agreeing on ‘Brief’. But “Brief” what? “Brief episode”? “Brief Love”? “Brief” what? And I suddenly said what about “Encounter”? And everyone said, “Yes, that will do. That’s it. ‘Brief Encounter’”.  It’s a rather fancy word, actually. It’s not all that good, but it worked.

It worked so well that when I was asked by my editor at Faber last week to make a short video to introduce my book The Faber Book of British Cinema, the clip I chose to capture an essence of the British cinema at its very best was from the film.

It was the scene, close to the very end, in which we see what actually happened when Laura popped outside the railway station tea-room – her terrifying brief encounter with the Express. “I meant to do it, Fred. I really meant to do it. I stood there trembling right on the edge...”

In that brief moment her every instinct is to jump, but as the boat train clatters furiously past, she is left thankfully still alive on the platform, able to return to her life as a middle-class, middle-aged Home Counties housewife.

Laura Karenina

When Brief Encounter went into production in early 1945, most people thought of it as a Noël Coward film, which was being directed by David Lean. But after Brief Encounter opened, at the New Gallery Cinema in Regent Street, on 26 November 1945, it quickly became clear that – in accounting for the film’s success – Lean mattered as much if not more than Coward.

It was really much more accurate to say that Brief Encounter was a David Lean film that happened to have started out life as a Noël Coward play. It was the point at which Lean’s genius fully announced itself, as he transformed a short one-act play into a piece of cinematic billiance, asserting his total command of film language to extract every last ounce of emotion.

Eighty years on, the film still retains a raw power in its faultless depiction of romantic despair. It is timeless, as relevant now as it was then – as it will be always so long as love continues to conquer with its routine disregard for good sense.

In a recent piece on the film that appeared in the Guardian, I read that, although the setting for the brief encounter of the title was the imaginary Home Counties railway station of Milford Junction, Carnforth station in Lancashire was chosen “to give the crew time to cover their lamps in the event of a German air raid”. A similarly unlikely account was given in a recent BBC radio documentary.

But in February 1945, when Lean’s production company, Cineguild, went up to Lancashire to film the railway station sequences, large-scale German bombing raids were long over. It’s true that there was still the odd V2 to worry about, but there would have been no time whatsoever for the film crew to “cover their lamps” as the weapon – which travelled several times faster than the speed of sound – notoriously landed without warning.

But ironically the visit to Carnforth turned out to be much more dangerous than if the crew had used a location close to Denham Studios, where the interior scenes were filmed. On Monday 12 February, soon after they arrived at the station, oil and petrol drums stored at a military depot about a hundred yards up the track caught fire. “The whole place seemed to go up suddenly in a terrific sheet of flame,” recalled an eyewitness. “Containers were going off like guns being fired.”

Lethal débris was hurled over the roof of the station, where Cineguild were shooting the film. As well as several local extras, three of the principal actors were in the line of fire: Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson and Joyce Barbour (the original choice to play Laura’s gossiping neighbour Dolly Messiter before she was later replaced by Everley Gregg).

The actual reason for Carnforth station being chosen, remembered Tony Havelock-Allan, was the fact that it looked like an appropriately suburban station but was on the main England–Scotland line, which made it possible to have the Express pass through:

It didn’t have any rail traffic between 12 and 4 in the morning on certain days of the week. That’s why we chose it. There was no other station of comparable size. It couldn’t be a wayside station, because there wouldn’t be a restaurant buffet. We took the railway companies’ advice on this... And from 12 o’clock at night until 4 o’clock in the morning nothing happened. We could have it. We could alter the set. We put up the railway clock, we put up the clock that suited the time in our story.

In the script there was a scene where at one moment she rushes out – it’s straight from Anna Karenina – and for a moment we think that she is going to throw herself under the train. That was the midnight express, that was the great London–Glasgow midnight train. It was the train. It was one of those great original engines. It had just come over whatever it is called, Craig Fell, and it had gathered full speed by the time it had got to Carnforth and it was going through at about 120 miles per hour. All we had to do was to be ready when we wanted to shoot the scene and to prepare everything, and have somebody notify us when it had passed a point half a mile away to give us time for Celia  at a given moment to be pushed out of the door.

It was the only train that went through Carnforth between 12 and 4 in the morning. It passed through the same time every night of the week bar Saturday or Sunday or whatever it was. We knew its schedule. If we were working on something else, we would wait while it went and then go on with the work. On the night we wanted to use it, we had Celia ready at the door which we’d erected.

Brief Encounter was a chamber piece of a film, but the Rank Organisation gave Cineguild effectively limitless resources that Lean was able to use to get the film perfect. He wrote about this lucky situation in a piece for The Penguin Film Review that was published in 1947: “We ‘can make any subject we wish, with as much money as we think that [a] subject should have spent on it. We can cast whatever actors we choose, and we have no interference at all in the way the film is made.’” Indeed, when it came to Joyce Barbour, Lean was even able to re-cast – what must have been at huge expense – an actor he had already filmed. “Such is the enviable position of British film-makers today, and such are the conditions which have at last given our films a style and nationality of their own.”

But the price of such ideal working conditions was unsustainable. Brief Encounter cost £300,000 ($1,200,000), which in 1945 was a colossal amount of money to spend on such a small film. It needed to do more than just well abroad, especially in the huge American market.

It was distributed there in 1946 by Universal as a "Prestige Picture". While it enjoyed long runs in small arthouse cinemas, it did not receive the general release that was required to win back the money that the Rank Organisation had poured into it. 

Under the headline, “Splendid British Drama Lacks Marquee Values”, the US trade magazine, Film Bulletin, provided a succinct summary of the box-office wisdom of the time. Acknowledging an “artistic triumph”, it wrote that, “Brief Encounter is a tender, touching and realistically told drama of middle-aged love, a rare gem of a film which will be appreciated by discriminating patrons in art theatres but holds scant interest for mass audiences. Except for Noël Coward’s fame, this British-made film has no selling names and its quiet intensity may prove boring to the younger movie-goers and the action fans.” 

The hard commercial truths of this review help to account for the star-heavy, international action pictures that Lean would go on to make from the 1950s. Brief Encounter represented the uncompromising pinnacle of what Lean was capable of before he finally left British style behind for the full-blown Hollywood approach of his later films.

But  for all Lean's obvious brilliance,  any true attempt to account for the timeless quality of Brief Encounter must give equal credit to the contribution of an extraordinarily talented actress.  “He loved most of all,” recalled Havelock-Allan, “actors who he felt would have no difficulty doing whatever he asked them to do”. 

That was why he loved Celia Johnson. She was an extraordinarily disciplined, professional actress who could deliver what he asked for and had a rare gift for crystallizing raw emotion on the screen. It was something, Tony recalled, that astonished everyone who was able to witness her performance on the set:

 I remember members of the crew saying to me what a marvellous, extraordinary woman Celia was. She would play a scene and she would have them with tears in their eyes, and the moment the director said cut, she didn’t change, her expression didn’t change at all. She went quietly back to her seat, picked up her crossword puzzle and started to fill in the word that had come to her while she had played this emotional scene. She usually had something to knit, and so she showed no sign that she had gone through any emotional experience. And yet she had given to the camera the feeling of emotional experiences that moved people on a film set, not in a darkened cinema...

Celia had a sort of natural – I don’t know how one would put it. She seemed to be a sort of absolute model for a distinction that now doesn’t exist any more for the difference between a lady and not a lady. But she had an absolutely inoffensive aristocracy of behaviour... There was nothing to suggest it in her breeding or anything. But she would have been perfectly good casting for a royal princess.

So much of the poetry of Brief Encounter lay in distilling the repression of an English-style romance. Laura’s own remark in the film about the way her nearly-lover Alec said his final goodbye captures this quality:  "Alec behaved beautifully. With such perfect politeness. No one could have guessed what he was really feeling.”

In filming this English-style farewell scene twice, Lean required Celia Johnson to play first the public Laura and then the private Laura. She had to project a pretence of calm and then – with the aid of a Robert Krasker-tilt that anticipated The Third Man – show what she was really feeling.

This ability to articulate a double life reminded me of the following anecdote that Tony told me about her:

She had a very pretty daughter and a nice-looking son, who worked with us... I thought he was charming. But she wasn’t absolutely sure whether he was a homosexual or not and was very worried about it. She came home unexpectedly one day, rang the front doorbell and the door was opened by her son dressed as a woman. She didn’t say anything. She only said, “Well, I just called to see if Mrs What’s Her Name is in and I see that she isn’t, so will you tell her I called and I’ll be back later.” 

She never let on for one second that she was shocked out of her life because that made it absolutely certain. She was a very, very remarkable girl. I met her in Harley Street, the last day I saw her. And to this day I swear, I’ll bet she was coming away from being told that she hadn’t long to live... We had a perfectly ordinary conversation. “How nice to see you. You’re looking very well.”  And all the rest of it. But I’ll bet –  I mean within four or five months she was dead. And I think that she had already been told that. A wonderful girl.