James Oliver reassesses the 'lesser' Brief Encounter.
Four Years after Brief Encounter, David Lean made another film about a married woman contemplating a fling with Trevor Howard. Perhaps inevitably, it's been overshadowed by its illustrious predecessor. But The Passionate Friends is one of the hidden treasures of Lean's career: those romantics happily wedded to Brief Encounter will find it a tempting bit on the side.
Ann Todd takes the lead as Mary Justin; as a younger woman she came close to eloping with Steven Stratton (Howard). But she chose respectability and stability instead, staying with her older husband, Howard. Now, by chance, she meets Steven again and the torments of duty and desire resurface and she is driven towards an agonising choice.
Much more than a thin retread of an earlier triumph, The Passionate Friends offers a darker vision than Brief Encounter. It's a triangle, rather than a two hander, and there is anger to balance the love. The husband – played by Claude Rains, cinema's greatest cuckold (see also: Notorious) – is a much more volatile figure than Celia Johnson's passive spouse; his destructive jealousy is made all too understandable.
With its hard shadows and forceful editing, it's almost an expressionist film. Certainly, it's the film that best displays Lean's mastery of film technique. His stated goal was to capture thought on film and there are sequences where he does just that, using both camera and editing to take us inside the minds of his characters. His skills as a visualist are also to the fore. He wrings every inch of production value from his foreign locations and expensive settings and offers a stark contrast to Brief Encounter: where that film was provincial and purposefully unglamorous, The Passionate Friends is international and glossy.
The film suffered a troubled production history, with Lean replacing Ronald Neame in the director's chair shortly after filming had begun and this creative turbulence surely fed into the end product. It's certainly the most ragged entry in the Lean filmography: its complicated flashback structure doesn't quite come off. The film's sheer emotional clout, however, transcends such shortcomings and places it amongst Lean's finest achievements.
An acclaimed drama based on the novel by HG Wells in which a young woman weds an older man for security and financial stability. A chance meeting with a former lover rekindles the flames leaving her torn between a life of comfort and a life of love and happiness.
This is a fascinating companion piece to Brief Encounter, with a number of similar themes, and the central trio of the love triangle - Ann Todd, Claude Rains and Trevor Howard - are superb.
