Brief Encounter Eighty Years Later

“One has one’s roots after all, hasn’t one?” says Dolly Messiter. Laura briefly wishes her annoying neighbour were dead, but Dolly is quite right. Even Brief Encounter had its roots. It was an adaptation of Noël Coward’s short play, Still Life, which was performed as part of the Tonight at 8.30 cycle of one-act dramas at the Phoenix Theatre in 1936.

But really to get to the roots of it, one needs to go back further to an often quoted poem by Ernest Dowson, first published in the 1890s – and perhaps even further to an ode by the Roman poet Horace, about middle-aged love, which provided Dowson with the poem’s Latin title: “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae”:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind,

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,    

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

This particular verse – one of four in the complete poem – provided the name for the most successful movie of all time, Gone with the Wind, but it was the refrain, “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion”, that pointed the way to Brief Encounter.

Often quoted, in the year that Brief Encounter was released, 1945, it appeared in Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love: “Husbands, we knew, were not always faithful, this we must be prepared for, we must understand and forgive. ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion’ seemed to explain it beautifully. But women – that was different; only the lowest of the sex could love or give themselves more than once.”

A once famous between-the-wars play, long forgotten now, dramatised this idea of flawed fidelity fifteen years earlier. Written by Harold Harwood and Robert Gore-Browne, Cynara was based on Gore-Browne’s 1929 novel The Imperfect Lover. It had opened at the Playhouse Theatre in the West End on 26 June 1930, where it enjoyed a long, seven-month run. Starring Gerald Du Maurier and Gladys Cooper, it told the story of a middle-aged couple whose otherwise happy marriage is shaken by the husband’s affair with a shop-girl, who commits suicide after she loses her job and her lover returns to his wife. Stealing the show with a heart-rending performance was the young actress who played the shop-girl.

“Celia Johnson’s treatment of the role is a beautiful one, restrained, clear-cut, thoughtful but informed with warmth and light,” wrote the reviewer for The New York Times. A year later, the play enjoyed an equally successful run, although with different actors, on Broadway. It was then turned into a Hollywood film, starring Ronald Colman and Kay Francis, with Phyllis Barry in the part of “the other woman” that Celia Johnson had played on stage.

By one of those coincidences, Noël Coward had a small involvement in the earlier play. He wrote a song for it, called “Goodbye, You Daffodils”. So it’s possible he had Cynara in mind when he wrote Still Life. The similarity of theme is striking. Cynara tells the story of an essentially decent man who falls in love with another woman but does not stop loving his wife – with tragic consequences for the lover, who cannot stop loving him. “I love them just the same, Fred I mean and the children,” says Laura in the Coward play, “but it’s as though it wasn’t me at all – as though I were looking on at someone else. Do you know what I mean? Is it the same with you? Or is it easier for men?”  As Nancy Mitford pointed out, it was a lot easier for men.

But Coward was not the only creator of Brief Encounter. The person who actually gave the film its name, Anthony Havelock-Allan, was among the audience who went to see Cynara at the Playhouse in 1930. An avid theatre-goer, he would a few years later break into the film industry as the casting director of a Jack Buchanan musical called Brewster’s Millions.

And in 1936 he was in the audience at the Criterion Theatre when another young actor won the attention of the West End critics. Only twenty-three, Trevor Howard appeared in Terence Rattigan’s hit play French Without Tears. He was one of what seems now a notably star-studded cast that included Rex Harrison, Guy Middleton, Roland Culver, Jessica Tandy and Kay Hammond.

As the character Kenneth Lake, Howard was required to play what Havelock-Allan would call – in describing his performance to me more than sixty years later – a quintessential Englishman: “There was that sort of special quality – what is, anyway, to me as an Englishman, the most attractive side of the English as a race: you know that he would be absolutely honest, you know that he would be a very reliable friend. He would be not entirely understanding of a lot of things, but his instincts would be all on the side of decency and loyalty and honesty.”

So much of the success of Brief Encounter was the perfect casting of its chief protagonists, which owed a huge amount to Havelock-Allan’s deep knowledge of the contemporary West End theatre. One reason why he had a hunch that Still Life could work as a film was the fact that he had already seen it as a play. He was in the audience when Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence first performed it at the Phoenix Theatre. “All you needed to do was to show the events that are talked about in the railway station buffet and add a few more perfectly normal, everyday life scenes between them... It would then make a story of two very decent human beings, both married and with settled backgrounds, having the misfortune in middle life to fall in love quite accidentally and simply not know how they are going to be able to handle the problem.”

Of course it helped too that the film was a prestige production, into which the Rank Organisation was prepared to pour near-limitless resources. Its notoriously exacting director, David Lean, was free to push for perfection. The cost, according to the trade press of the time, was well over £300,000, which was, in 1945, a huge amount of money for such a small film.

The actress who had, on Noël Coward’s recommendation, started out playing Laura Jesson’s gossiping acquaintance, Dolly Messiter, was Joyce Barbour. But when Lean began to direct her in the part, it quickly became apparent that she wasn’t right for it. “She was obviously a very nice woman,” Havelock-Allan recalled. “And therefore if she had twigged anything, she would not have said anything to anybody. She might even have said to herself, ‘How nice for them. I do hope they’re able to have an affair without breaking up their families,’ but never mentioning it to anyone else. What we really needed to give tension to the scene was the kind of woman who was quite obviously a village gossip, who was quite obviously a woman very interested in everybody else’s affairs.”

And so, in spite of the considerable expense and inconvenience of recasting, Joyce Barbour was replaced by Everley Gregg, “obviously a dangerous woman, the last kind of woman you would want to know anything you wanted to have kept secret”.

But it was the technique and professionalism of Celia Johnson that most stood out during shooting. She had the ability to deliver, with precision, the exact nuances of performance that David Lean called for. “He knew that if he wanted her to lift an eyelid on a given phrase, she could do it,” Havelock-Allan recalled. “If he wanted her to stand on her head and say the next lines upside down, she could do it. She would need a little time for rehearsal. I mean there was nothing she couldn’t do. In this film there are only two people, who are a lot of the time the only two people who are on the stage, and Celia would play a scene that would have the camera crew and all of us who were there going, ‘I’ve got a lump in my throat,’ walk off the set, pick up her crossword and say, ‘I knew I would get the word: I got it half way through the scene. It’s Terpsichore.’  Or something like that. She could switch it off, or switch it on. And it wasn’t because she didn’t feel it. She was absolutely full of feeling. But her talent was highly disciplined and never allowed to interfere with her private preoccupations.”

It was a talent that complemented Lean’s own virtuso command of the visual presentation of the film. “He knew everything there was to know about the cinema,” observed Havelock-Allan, “but very little about anything else. When we were making Brief Encounter, there was an afternoon when we had to wait for a set to be prepared. We whiled away the time in Celia’s dressing-room, playing that game when you take a word – LATIN, for example. Then each person chooses a category after each of the letters, and the others have to think of famous people beginning with the letter. Without giving it much thought, I chose Renaissance painters. David said, ‘Well, that’s no good. Who the hell of us know any Renaissance painters, except you.’ David was very conscious of his shortcomings, but too closed-up and defensive to address them. He tried to keep himself in an atmosphere of films and nothing else.”

But such inhibition was a perfect quality to bring to a film about a closed-up, defensive character like Laura Jesson. Much of the pathos of Brief Encounter was due to the fact that Lean could recognize and represent her weaknesses with the strength of fellow feeling. The result was a very English, but deeply moving, ode to repression.

The one difference that Havelock-Allan had with Lean over shooting was the sequence in which the couple meet in a friend’s flat. How it was shot was key to conveying the guilt-ridden, furtive nature of the relationship. When she arrives, Laura doesn’t take the lift in case she should be recognized but instead walks up the stairs. “David wanted to put the flat on the fourth floor, but I said that this would stretch it too far, and besides it would cost us much more money. The set from the stairs up to the second floor would supply all the tension inherent in the scene, all the feeling of guilt and all the feeling of sexual excitement that there is in this going-to-meet – two very nice-looking people who clearly want to make love to each other. It was about the only time I ever persuaded David not to spend money.”

Even if it still cost quite a bit of money, both Havelock-Allan and Lean thought that Brief Encounter was too small for there ever to be a big audience, but they were pleased all the same with the result. “We never at any moment thought there was anything that we could have changed about it for the better,” said Havelock-Allan. “We didn’t think of it in terms of ‘best film’. You don’t ever think about it until afterwards. When other people talk about films, you begin to sort it out. But when you’ve made the film, the first question you ask yourself is how close have we got to what I thought we were going to make, to the way I thought this film was going to turn out. And no film I’ve ever been connected with met more exactly the simple standards that we had set ourselves: the simple rules of telling this very simple story. Whether people would like it or not, we had no idea. We didn’t think that many people would. Because we thought that the normal Noël Coward audience would be too sophisticated to like it, while the ordinary film-going, mass audience would find it not exciting enough... It wasn’t flashy enough, it wasn’t snappy enough, it wasn’t unusual enough to appeal to the sophisticated audience. And it wasn’t nearly full enough of action or threat of anything – nothing is threatened in the film except the personalities of the two characters. We couldn’t see that there was anything in normal film terms that would attract an audience to go and see it...   I think David was glad to do it because it was the last quiet film that he was ever going to do. His ambitions were to do things much bigger.”

Ahead of him was Great Expectations, Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, but he would continue to make love stories. Only now they were on the largest possible scale...