Brief Encounter 2

It requires only a brief encounter with the 1974 remake of Brief Encounter to appreciate what a bad film it is. The first mistake, of course, was to attempt to remake such an iconic film at all. “If the original one is one of those rare occasions when everything clicks into place, it’s fatal,” commented Sir Anthony Havelock-Allan, who produced the original Brief Encounter. “Whatever you do, it will never be as good.”

The appearance of the sultry Sophia Loren as a middle-class, middle-aged house wife already shatters the audience’s credulity before it is then asked to accept the sulphurous, heavy-drinking Welsh miner’s son, Richard Burton, as the mild-mannered English doctor who falls in love with her after removing a piece of grit from her eye.

In the original film that piece of grit is the result of a steam engine passing through as Laura Jesson waits on a station platform. It doesn’t make sense that thirty years later it should be caused by an electric train, but there were far more serious obstacles that kept it from being successful. Even at the time it was being made, Richard Burton expressed the view that he ought to have known better. “I thought you cannot compete against the ghosts of memorable performances,” he correctly observed of his initial reluctance to be involved, but then Sophia Loren “in that gently imperious voice which turns my stomach into a bag of butterflies persuaded me”.

The presence of its two mega-stars transformed a small, intimate subject into  a titanic production that was steaming towards an iceberg in plain sight. There was not only the spectacular miscasting but the fact that this classic story of English reserve was being told against the backdrop of a 1970s Britain of glam rock and Page Three girls.

In truth, the prim, repressed Laura Jesson was even a little dated when Celia Johnson played her in 1945, but it worked because being out of date was part of what the film was about. With its setting in some imprecise period in some unknown town, it was distant enough from any specific reality to be able to retain an appeal for all the many people – of any time – who, like Laura, are rarely in fashion and struggle to feel at ease.

But the remake was fixed to the drab specificity of early 1970s Welfare State Britain. At that point in British history there was little that lent itself to romanticisation. The tide of a previous revolutionary decade had rolled out. It left stranded on the beach flotsam and jetsam of such dreariness that it is difficult not to suppress a yawn in thinking about those years now.

In place of that magnificent steam engine that thunders through an imaginary Milford Junction, bellowing a long, thick mane of smoke behind it, the audience must settle instead for the nondescript electric trains of British Rail, clattering through a very dull-looking Winchester station. It was not the kind of locomotive that any serious tragic heroine would want to be seen dead under.

Britain had become a shabby, untidy place where the permissive society meant that marital transgression was much more likely to be an occasion of laughter than guilt. Dominating the popular culture of the day was the smut of the Benny Hill Show or films like Confessions of a Window Cleaner. In this atmosphere, as several columnists pointed out before anyone even had a chance to see the film, a remake of Brief Encounter could hardly have been  more mistimed. “Today, an English Lady, with all her inhibitions, proprieties, responsibility and dignified determination to behave well, is just a contemptuous joke,” commented Anne Edwards in the Sunday Express. “It is much to my regret that Ladies exist no more, except as a label on a loo.”

The film made some sort of sense, I suppose, as a profitable exercise in nostalgia for the aging TV mogul Sir Lew Grade, who pre-sold the production to the American television network NBC. And maybe Sophia Loren herself saw it as a present to the film’s executive producer – her husband Carlo Ponti, the Italian movie mogul who had left his first wife to marry her. 

But it predictably failed to impress when it was first broadcast in the autumn of 1974. “Tonight at 8.30 on NBC TV, Brief Encounter is turned into a seemingly endless confrontation with tedium,” wrote the New York Times. Its chief appeal – but available only to the small number of people then familiar with the earlier film – was the compulsive fascination of watching a misbegotten venture travesty a masterpiece: two of the world’s most famous movie stars  attempt an inevitable losing battle of competing – to borrow Burton’s words again –  “against the ghosts of memorable performances”.

When Alec takes Laura (although in the remake Laura is now called Anna) to the flat he has borrowed from a friend at work, there is the prurient curiosity, now that it is the 1970s, of whether he will manage to get her into bed. He does but barely has time to fumble at her blouse before they are interrupted – in another piece of tone-deaf casting – by the unexpected return of his friend, played by John Le Mesurier, at the time a star of Dad’s Army, one of Britain’s most popular TV comedies.

And it is perhaps as a comedy that Brief Encounter 2 works best. It was certainly very difficult to resist the comic incongruity of Sophia Loren rushing to turn off a whistling kettle in the local office of the Winchester Citizens Advice Bureau, where she works as easily the most glamorous councillor the organisation ever had; or of her returning home to a rather pudgy Jack Hedley, whom viewers of that time would have known best as the senior British officer in the popular BBC TV drama, Colditz.

This rather odd couple left me musing on  possible alternative castings that might have created the absent emotional fire. Perhaps the most promising was what had been originally intended – that Robert Shaw should play the doctor. He had only the year before starred opposite Sarah Miles in The Hireling, another story about an impossible love, which probably accounted for why its director, Alan Bridges, was chosen to direct the remake of Brief Encounter.

As The Hireling won the Palme d’Or at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, it was a spectacular example of how an unwise career choice can swiftly plunge a director into the depths. But fate can just as often work the other way around: Robert Shaw was forced to drop out when the previous movie he was working on ran over-schedule: it was a film about a shark directed by a young director called Steven Spielberg.

The alternative casting that I would most love to have seen – if only Carlo Ponti had not been too afraid of his second wife to suggest it – would have been to give the role of Laura Jesson to Elizabeth Taylor, who Burton had then only recently broken up with. I don’t think it would have saved the film, but it would have made a fantastic companion piece to another classic drama of middle age, in which Burton and Taylor had never been better.

Thanks to Youtube, anyone who wishes to make the comparison between the two Brief Encounters, can easily do so. Best to see Brief Encounter first, though, because that will be the best way then to enjoy Brief Encounter 2.