The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  So the jokes miss the desperate futility of Brief Encounter and the way it elects to live without satisfaction, or despite it. It’s a setup that could easily bend to the romantic pressures common at the end of the war. These lovers—fortyish, both married with two children, both settled, it seems—could elect to leave their spouses and follow their desires. There could be a turmoil of separation or divorce (as in Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea), with the confusion of sexual liberation, remarriage, and guilt. It could be a film like…well, there’s the point. Search through the archive of American and British films in the 1940s and ’50s and it’s not easy to recall films that trace an overwhelming affair, the termination of one or two marriages, and the attempt to make a new one. In life, such actions were on the increase, and they might have been expected to affect the screen’s story material. But the old precept of censorship seemed in place still, strengthened by a commercial fear that it was perilous to make heroes and heroines out of adulterers. Marriage in the English-speaking movie may be a disaster, a comic shambles, or a dead place, but it spurs more thoughts of murder than remarriage.

  Nor is it fair to put all the blame for Brief Encounter on the emotional diffidence of David Lean—an extremely attractive man, often charged with having difficulty in talking to women, but a serial womanizer, the religious strictness of whose upbringing preceded a very untidy marital life. Adulterous relationships are common in Lean’s work—The Passionate Friends and Madeleine (both of which star one of his wives, Ann Todd), Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter. The thought of attraction nags away at dull life without much prospect of ultimate satisfaction. Yet moviegoing, by implication, is a fantasy pursuit in which members of all the sexes are somehow encouraged to fall in love with different people every week in pictures that (in the 1940s especially) were inclined to end on a lovers’ embrace, which played on the curtains of the theater as they were drawn. Was that a warning, that the dream was a ruffled contrivance?

  In Brief Encounter, finally, Laura’s husband, Fred—not a very searching portrayal, though he is meant to be a kindly man—will say of his wife that she seems to have “been a long way away.” In fact she’s been no further than a nearby railway junction, but the “long way away” is referring to the “somewhere” that had been invoked in The Wizard of Oz. It’s like saying that the wife has been to the house of fantasy, the movies, where such journeys are catered to. I’m not sure that the husband in Brief Encounter has guessed or wants to know the awful truth, and there’s no hint that the couple is going to have a “heart-to-heart” in which the whole thing is admitted. The British will overlook landfills of embarrassment. Still, Laura’s voice-over (the engine of the film) is as if offered as confession. But she’s talking to herself—that is going to be the discourse of the rest of her life. Her husband’s suburban decency or discretion believes in keeping quiet or not knowing, and it doesn’t consider revivifying a flat marriage. Laura has discovered the limits of her union, her “love life,” and the impossibility of improving it. So what the film seems to say is go to the movies, have your frictionless fling, and then get on with the limited benefits of a domestic stalemate: stability, small talk, and Fred doing crossword puzzles while Laura sits dreaming to Rachmaninoff. If you put it like that, the comparison with Ozu becomes more meaningful.

  The affair is closing as the film starts. These lovers will not meet again; his hand on her shoulder is their parting gesture—because the crass Dolly Messiter has blundered in upon them (there are three women in the film who are of Laura’s rank and class and they all seem frustrated to a degree). So Laura tells the story, and I think it was deaf of Lindsay Anderson to hear only a high-pitched voice. Celia Johnson had elocution, but that never spoils her emotional honesty. She catches Laura’s unexpected rapture, her recklessness, her shy lust, and her sense of crushed dignity. None of which makes her character unduly intelligent or remotely feminist. But it sets us up for the film’s unflinching conclusion: the loneliness that is left for Laura.

  By contrast, Alec (Trevor Howard) is more interesting: he’s a doctor with a research subject and a plan of going to South Africa to pursue it. (No one in Britain understood South Africa yet!) Yes, he’s losing Laura, and Howard leaves no doubt about that blow, but we are open to what life has in store for him. Whereas Laura has nothing to anticipate. It may come from Noel Coward—and the credits do introduce “Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter,” with Lean’s name mentioned only as director—but there is a tacit admission of women’s tragic position, whereas in Lean’s best-loved films (Kwai and Lawrence), the world is dominated by active men doing big things to change history with hardly a female in sight.

  The bond between Lean and Coward is not to be danced over. In show business terms, Coward was of a much higher class when he adopted Lean as a protégé. No one ever noticed anything like an affair between them, but they made four films in a row, and Coward was good at being one of the boys, whether in a naval unit or a film crew. In the years they were a team, Coward had at least one risky affair, with an ordinary seaman—and Coward was not widely perceived in Britain as gay. There were women fans who adored him, not too far from the Laura Jessons of the world, and simply supposed that he was a “gentleman.” Lean was very good-looking, very smart, and ambitious—all of which leads to the rather un-English fascination of Brief Encounter with the female mind.

  So this women’s picture looks noir. That’s not just the lustrous, shadowed lighting by Robert Krasker (he did Odd Man Out and The Third Man, too), but also the feeling of urban enclosure in the railway station, where the lovers seem caught between railway protocol (as embodied by Stanley Holloway and Joyce Carey) and the thunderous nonstop passage of the express, which tempts Laura into suicide. Now, Brief Encounter is not often listed among the noirs, but it is a film about traps, feeling guilty, and being imprisoned against your nature.

  So what do Alec and Laura do on their Thursday afternoons in Milford? They take a genteel lunch together and then go to “the pictures.” Their cinema seems crowded. They rock with laughter at Donald Duck. She is bored by a “noisy musical.” And they watch Flames of Passion—a silly Hollywood product (no details supplied)—before they walk out. What they need to see is Un Chien Andalou (or Blue Velvet), but such programs could not come to “Milford.” What I mean by that is to say that a contemporary novelist—Graham Greene, perhaps—might notice that these two pilgrims of awakened feeling need to have sex. You can’t say “f###” about the movie, because no one could say that on screen in 1945. Alec and Laura do nearly make it in a borrowed flat, but then the tenant, an odiously supercilious Valentine Dyall, returns, and they are humiliated. (Moreover, the brief talk between Alec and this man is heavy with homosexual suggestions.)

  Alec and Laura are in love with each other, and in love with love, and it might be that a few ecstatic hours in bed could avert tragedy or divorce. But as it is, they are stranded between the fancy of Flames of Passion and love scenes that one feels Coward and Lean would rather not see, just as the audience of 1945 would have been horrified by them. Celia Johnson’s large eyes are naked to our scrutiny, but that’s as far as that word could go—all of which leaves the imagining more intense.

  So Laura dreams. On her way home on the train, after their nicest Thursday, she gazes at the night through the window and sees idyllic visions: the two of them dancing beneath chandeliers; at the Paris Opéra; in a gondola on the Grand Canal in Venice; in a sports car traveling against a back projection; on the deck of an ocean liner in the moonlight, watching the ocean pass by, and on a desert island beneath palm trees. These are an anthology of a life at the movies, and we feel that that entertainment is Laura’s key point of reference in thoughts of “love.” Above all, the scenes in a romantic movie are serene and assured, whereas what she hates about her affair is how close it comes to the furtive, the “low and the common.” There is a moment when she and Fred discuss what to do with their children one day—one wants the circus, the other
a pantomime. So the businesslike Fred suggests leaving them both behind so that he can take Laura to the movies. When he proposes this she bursts into tears.

  I think it’s fair to feel unduly confined by Brief Encounter, and to say these characters need sex lives and, quite simply, more going on in their lives as a whole. But I’m not sure Coward and Lean were off the mark in supposing that not many people then really had sex lives, or the liberty to admit to them—and in part that is because their movies had not done much more than offer the vaguest romantic imagery. This would be a very different film if Laura learned to appreciate that Alec was better in bed than Fred and that that had some impact on her overall health and sanity. Brief Encounter is not that film, but the story of people caught between a sad reality and a great dream. The action begins to teach Laura to give up the dream, and recognize her own loneliness. So Trevor Howard is fine in the film, but he is the handsome, nice lover figure as seen from her point of view. The film’s core is Laura’s aching experience, and that is how it hangs on Celia Johnson’s crushed gaze.

  All over the world, in 1945 and the years thereafter, there were films that began to question the innocent romance of filmgoing (and its censorship of sexual action). Italian neorealism is the most obvious example in its blunt insistence on inescapable realities. In America, film noir opened up a kind of despair that had found no room for expression in the era of happy endings. That’s why it is important to see noir functioning in more than the hardboiled thrillers. The woman’s film was helped in its very gradual advance on feminism by the new appreciation of the difficult lives led by women—among the pictures that fit as noir weepies are Mildred Pierce (1945), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Brief Encounter, and even A Place in the Sun (1951). For a new subject was building, and it wanted to know how far the cinema’s lavish play upon our desires had been just a commercial trick rather than candid respect for that longing.

  So the skittish response of some British intellectuals to Brief Encounter is not misplaced. It is one of the first films that wonders, when are women going to understand that they deserve sex and must find it for themselves? Trevor Howard believed there should have been a sex scene, and the preview audience mocked the film’s chastity. So it’s not easy to abide by the film now—until we face the haggard beauty of Celia Johnson and the roar of the express. As Roger Manvell said of Johnson’s Laura, “She looks quite ordinary until it is time for her to look like what she feels.” That is a model for film acting. There is even a moment, in the train station café, as she hears the express coming, that the camera tilts over, making her seem drunk or distraught as she goes to meet it. It’s a calculated effect, and Lean easily gets overcalculated—but in this case the vibrato works just because the image seems to be willed by the actress.

  The railway setting adds a lot to the picture: the train timetable is a version of duty’s claim on everyone. But I wonder sometimes how it would have been if the entire Brief Encounter had taken place in the dark of a cinema, where the lovers hold hands, but that touch hardly impinges on the drastic penetration of their innocence by something better than Flames of Passion.

  War

  A world war is fought everywhere, and by the time of World War II, the screen was a battleground, too. Sometimes a young mind could confuse the real thing with screen action. In J. G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun, the boy Jim is stranded in Shanghai as the Japanese invade.

  He rested in the padlocked entrance to the Nanking Theatre, where Gone with the Wind had been playing for the past year in a pirated Chinese version. The partly dismantled faces of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh rose on their scaffolding above an almost life-size replica of burning Atlanta. Chinese carpenters were cutting down the panels of painted smoke that rose high into the Shanghai sky, barely distinguishable from the fires still lifting above the tenements of the Old City, where Kuomintang irregulars had resisted the Japanese invasion.

  That hallucination is vivid on the page. In his film version of Empire of the Sun (1987), Steven Spielberg had a spectacular view of a huge Wind hoarding as the city disintegrated, but without the two kinds of smoke.

  The Second World War concluded more than sixty-five years ago. You wonder if it could be retired. But it never stops, or goes away. Is it really over? The First World War is beyond explanation: we understand it was terrible, but who knows now why it was fought? For the second war, we think we know that answer. It was the crisis of modern history, and it persists as a state of thought and feeling because of the Holocaust and nuclear weapons. Such dire things were done then, or revealed about us, that the atmosphere of our self-betrayal will not disperse.

  Filmmakers—some of them not born until after the war—remain gripped by the issues of war, and the ways ceaseless horror was identified in the years 1939–45. That may come from interest in the war itself, but we also realize how closely allied war and film were. War is the climax in the history of the movies as a public institution, and their vindication. It compelled the attention of masses of strangers in the dark, hanging upon the outcome. We know well enough that opposed governments produced films to “raise” morale, to make the war seem winnable and necessary. But the cinema itself—the place and its community—was as important as air-raid shelters.

  That notion can easily seem sentimental; it could be that the public was misled in deciding what the war was about. But once conflict was under way, the leaders and the commanders had less time for ideology, geopolitical strategy, and secret meanings than for survival. Wherever battle was joined, it was total, ruinous or glorious. The German onslaught in Western Europe was savage and story-like—the conquest of several countries was achieved in months, in ways that made the stalemate of the First World War seem archaic. No matter the “phony war” of 1939, 1940 was a year of devastation and remaking the maps, and its high summer saw a battle such as the world had never known, a struggle for air control. The Battle of Britain (the phrase was used at the time) was a public crisis in which the British felt the threat of invasion, and sometimes watched the dogfights that might determine it. They could follow the war like a sports event, and they had no reason for not knowing how serious the outcome would be, even if in 1940, say, the British public had only a sketchy idea of the evil at work in Germany.

  After that, it was one big match after another: the melodrama of Pearl Harbor, the struggle in North Africa, the sea battles in the Pacific, the German invasion of Russia, the invasion of Italy, D-day, the attack on Japan, and the steady map of Europe that ruled the front pages with heavy black arrows showing the convergence of Allied and Russian advance. People went to the movies in record numbers in these battle years. Few movie shows played without a newsreel. The public bought newspapers. They gathered around the radio. Many households followed progress with their homemade maps and paper flags to mark victories. The “news” was censored, obviously, but people trusted it—or needed it. The newsreels, when seen now, can seem embarrassingly facetious and rigged, but they were received with earnest applause in theaters. The home front mattered.

  The film director John Boorman (born in South London in 1933) was old enough to know: “How wonderful was the war! It gave common cause, equal rations, community endeavour, but most delightful of all it gave us the essential thing we lacked: it gave us a myth, a myth nurtured by the wireless, newspapers, the cinema that allowed us semi people to leap our garden gates, vault over our embarrassments into the arms of patriotism.” In that spirit, Boorman would make Hope and Glory (1987), one of those films that knows the adult tragedy of air raids competing with the kids’ feeling of a free fireworks show.

  Boorman’s dad, forty, joined up, and Mum was freed from a less-than-perfect marriage. Before the war, the Boormans had felt trapped in suburbia and knowing their own restricted place. So war was revolutionary: “There we were, marooned in this unformed fantasy, drowning but too polite to wave, when along came the war with lifelines for all. All our uncertainties of identity and dislocations could be su
bsumed in the common good, in opposing Evil—in full-blown, brass-band, spine-tingling, lump-in-throat patriotism. We had found our heroes—ourselves.”

  In Britain early on and in Germany later, movie theaters in urban centers were danger spots. A packed theater and a direct hit spelled disaster. For this reason alone, major sports events were restricted. But after the initial disquiet, theaters were allowed to function so that the great show of heroism could play. And if there was a problem telling the hero story at first—just because defeats were more common—then history was waiting as a treasure-house. That’s how Churchill and Alexander Korda conspired to make That Hamilton Woman with Olivier as Nelson.

  There were American filmmakers champing at the bit, eager to draw up battle lines on the back lot but restrained by America’s official policy of nonintervention. So Sergeant York (1941) re-created the First World War and reveled in the imagery of Gary Cooper picking off German soldiers like wild turkey. It is one of Howard Hawks’s few vulgar films, but the public swallowed it. Only a few months after Sergeant York, To Be or Not to Be suggested there might be finer movies made because of the war—and by a Berliner. Ernst Lubitsch was in agonies over the war, and he was not drawn to conventional, bloodthirsty heroism. Instead, he dreamed up the idea of Polish actors doing Hamlet for the Nazis, with the timid Jack Benny having to be brave. It is a film that has Sig Ruman marching around to the running joke “So they call me Concentration Camp Erhard, do they?” Something else added to the sting of this picture: by the time it opened, its leading lady, Carole Lombard, was dead, killed in a plane crash in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in January 1942 at the end of a trip to sell war bonds. She would be the only American movie star lost in the war effort.