BRIEF ENCOUNTER (87)

Directed by: David Lean (1945)

Starring: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway

The Pitch: Two married people, a suburban housewife and a local doctor, fall in love but finally, overcome by guilt, agree to separate.

Theo Sez: A little corny round the edges perhaps, but anyone who thinks this classic love story is fatally dated because of the guilt its married lovers feel, or their terror at being found out, is missing the point : this is a film about the mores of its time, which is why it can never date - it's as timeless as a Jane Austen comedy. The texture of middle-class suburban England circa 1945 - doing the "Times" crossword in the evenings, wondering whether to take the children to the circus or the pantomime - is caught with wondrous exactitude : perhaps only someone as unconventional (read "abnormal") in his private life as Noel Coward (who wrote the script, from his one-act play "Still Life") could have looked at the cosy pleasures of dull domesticity with such a delicate mix of longing and condescension. It's a stifling world - five years on, we sense, our heroine may not even be able to feel passion anymore, let alone act on it - but it's blissfully secure. Oddly enough the grander emotions are less convincing, somehow lacking in character - mad impetuous passion, even with Rachmaninov blaring on the soundtrack, is tricky to pin down ; fittingly, the film is above all a triumph for the solid virtues of craftsmanship, written and directed with a quiet, economical precision which (not least for those of us with pretensions to penning scripts) takes the breath away. When even the smallest character - the rather obnoxious friend who almost catches the couple at his apartment, his long-winded bonhomie hiding a sanctimonious streak ("I'm not angry Alec. Just disappointed") - remains vivid in the memory days later, you know you're in the presence of something pretty close to genius.