Fifty famous films : 1915-1945 (1960)

and teas to orchestral accompaniments, its streets and its dark prosaic station. The symbolism, the visual imagery of the cinema, is never long absent from poetically conceived films with emotional themes. The atmosphere of emotion and situation can be revealed with astonishing emphasis when this poetic technique is used aptly. Milford Junction, place of the lovers' meetings and partings, becomes this symbol. Since this technique is a matter of timing and relation to the rhythm of the film as a whole, bare statements in words cannot reveal that aptness. The skill of David Lean's direction is revealed in the manner the express trains which pass through but never stop at Milford symbolise the passion in which the lovers are involved, whereas the slow "stopping" trains which they have to catch so continuously carry them to their families and to their unromantic responsibilities. The dark, smoky passageways are symbolic of the loneliness of surreptitious waiting. The buffet where they sit during their last minutes each Thursday becomes the prototype of transient shelter. So, too, most of the additional characters, the ticket collector, the barmaid whom he courts with unromantic sang-froid, the woman in the cafe orchestra, all become grotesques, symbols of thwarted or casual love as seen through a lover's eyes. It is difficult to say to whom credit is due for the achievement of this film. David Lean directs, with Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame in charge of production on behalf of the Cineguild unit, which is part of the Rank organisation. The theme and script are the contribution of Noel Coward. When the same group produced This Happy Breed nearly two years earlier they had Celia Johnson, one of the finest of our British screen actresses, playing the housewife in this story of a London suburban family. In Brief Encounter she gives one of the most moving and restrained performances in British cinema of recent years. The film is hers, for the story is told by her and from her viewpoint. Trevor Howard, who plays the doctor, is a stage actor of distinction who has in Brief Encounter his first important part in a film. There is no false intonation, no touch of over-acting in either performance. If there had been, or if the scripting had led to the intrusion of this false note in either part, the film would have lost its atmosphere of actuality and become another screen romance with an unhappy ending. It is this quality of realism which makes Brief Encounter notable. At a time when the quantity of film production in Hollywood and Britain seems to necessitate so many adaptations from plays, in which situation and action depend too much on words to make good cinema, it is important to recognise in this film the continuous use of the powers of the film medium. This is developed to the full in the final scenes of the parting, repeated now as the climax of Laura Jesson's self-told experience. After the close-up shot of Alec's hand on her shoulder, he goes out. The sound of the approaching express train we have heard so often before attracts her attention. She rushes out to throw herself under it. But again it is her social sanity which saves her : suicide is not in her nature. She lets the train rush by her, its lights hitting her agonised face with a staccato pattern matching the roar of its wheels. Then she returns to her friend in the buffet, whose unceasing conversation pours over, emphasised by 93