The Big Screen (29 page)

There were other marvels: Laurence Olivier moved into the breach in 1944 and offered to direct
Henry V
—after the American William Wyler had stepped aside. I don't mean to disparage Wyler, but how could he have competed with Olivier's exultant display of heroism and swashbuckling, or his knowledge of Shakespeare? All his life, Olivier had doubts over his masculinity—years earlier, in Hollywood, big actresses had felt he didn't cut it—so Agincourt was his redemption. Then remember the wondrous opening: the busy Globe Theatre and the glimpse we get of the real actor nervous about playing the king.
Henry V
became a patriotic duty for British moviegoers, but it is a magical picture, at ease cutting together paintings of a city and the sweeping green meadows of Ireland for its battlefield. Think of the rush of arrows in the air, William Walton's music, and the lusty courtship at the end. Remember the panorama of Englishmen, and the sturdy eloquence of Leslie Banks as the Chorus. Seen at the age of four,
Henry V
could direct your life.

Hamlet
, a few years later, is not as piercing, I daresay, but true to its time, it is a film noir about a trapped man. Olivier is an ambiguous figure in British film history, and it may be hard for the rest of us to like him as much as he liked himself. But in the late 1940s, on-screen as well as-stage, he was a flag blowing in his own wind and a hero to the nation. We do not need to call him a great director, but
Henry V
and
Hamle
t were events that thrilled the world (and the Academy).

Still, that's not all. Ealing carried on after the war under Balcon and it uncovered Robert Hamer, a Cambridge student expelled for homosexual behavior, and thereafter a terrible drunk. Before he was through, he made
Pink String and Sealing Wax
(1945),
It Always Rains on Sunday
(1947), and
Kind Hearts and Coronets
(1949), a landmark comedy about class, murder, and voice-over narration (just before
Sunset Blvd.
). Harry Watt was allowed to discover Australia with
The Overlanders
(1946) and
Eureka Stockade
(1949). And gradually there developed what would become known as “the Ealing comedy,” a vein of social satire rooted in ordinary British life and eccentric characters:
Hue and Cry
(1947),
Passport to Pimlico
(1949),
Whisky Galore
(1949),
The Lavender Hill Mob
(1951),
The Ladykillers
(1955). Two names go with that list: the young Scot, born in America, Alexander Mackendrick, who directed
Whisky Galore
,
The Man in the White Suit
(1951), and
The Ladykillers
; and Alec Guinness, the first of an outstanding generation of British stage actors, who proved himself a subtle master of film. His first coup was playing eight members of the D'Ascoyne family in
Kind Hearts and Coronets
, all slain by the silky, murderous design of a social upstart, Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), who has hints of Oscar Wilde and the thrill of being outrageous.

And one more: Carol Reed. Born in London in 1906, the illegitimate son of the actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Reed worked in the theater and with Basil Dean at Ealing. He began to direct in the mid-1930s, but it was after the war that he really became himself, with an unmatched trio of films—
Odd Man Out
(1947), with James Mason as an Irish bankrobber mortally wounded and on the run in Belfast;
The Fallen Idol
(1948), from the Greene short story, with Ralph Richardson as the butler and Bobby Henrey as the child of the Belgravia house who trusts him. That project was a fruit of the friendship between Korda and Greene. In the glow of its success, the two men speculated over another project. Alex was keen for a spy story, to be set somewhere like Berlin or Vienna. In a world of intrigue and displaced persons, that subject was begging. Greene had a cue for him, an opening line, about one day seeing a man walking on the Strand in London, a man he believed was dead. Oh yes, said Alex, with enthusiasm, go with that. It was the start of
The Third Man
, a coproduction with Selznick on which Greene, Reed, and Korda overlooked all Selznick's mistaken brainwaves. The only American they listened to was Orson Welles: they gave him the cuckoo-clock speech in the scene on the big wheel in the desolate Prater playground. The result was an international wonder, with zither accompaniment.

Nothing lasts forever: “The fun has gone out of the film industry,” wrote Graham Greene when he heard—Korda died in 1956. He was only sixty-three, the age at which David Selznick had died. But those two had both filled their time and they had been knockabout, disputing partners on
The Third Man
(and then in court afterward). Robert Hamer ended up a drunk. Carol Reed went off the boil in ways he never understood. Powell and Pressburger broke up. And Britain, in general, remembered that it was a land of literature, theater—and television, the scale of which seemed to reassure and intrigue the British temperament. Michael Balcon persevered at Ealing, and no one deserved a knighthood more. But the kind of movies he liked would come to be made for television.

Still, you have to appreciate the impact British films made in those postwar years. Olivier got an honorary Oscar for
Henry V
, and Best Picture for
Hamlet
. In 1947, Britain won four Oscars: Guy Green for black-and-white cinematography on
Great Expectations
; Jack Cardiff for color on
Black Narcissus
; John Bryan for black-and-white art direction on
Great Expectations;
and Alfred Junge for color design on
Black Narcissus
. Then there were the nominations. Oscar meant a lot more in those days than it does now, and it had been American territory. But the British had broken through, and they have never lost that ground, even if British film production is often lamented by the British themselves. But the lesson of Ealing was plain. The British were equipped to make modest films that surprised audiences with their insight about human behavior. In time that model would be revived by perhaps the best film studio there ever was, the BBC, and a new tradition that would include John Boorman, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke, Terence Davies, and even Joseph Losey, who made some of the most insightful English films, from
The Servant
to
The Go-Between.

Both those films had scripts by Harold Pinter, just one of many writers in other forms who are unthinkable without the influence of the movies. Pinter also inherited a genteel, oblique recognition of how emotional, intimate, and unspoken violence can be. Of course, that tone was established by Alfred Hitchcock, as repressed yet as overwhelmed by feeling as so many of the best English films.

There are English jokes about
Brief Encounter
, and eyebrow-raising whenever its lush Rachmaninoff music (Piano Concerto No. 2) starts up. It sounds so emotional, yet the characters do so little. Lindsay Anderson, once a fierce and smart critic at
Sequence
, used to pummel David Lean's polite indirection: “When emotion threatens, make your characters talk about something else in a little, uncertain, high-pitched voice.”

There was a cliché about British understatement, and it was based on life. But was British restraint modest, brave, and civilized, or did the British really feel so little? That complaint might be turned into praise if we were talking about films as varied as those by Ozu, Bresson, or Hawks. There is a vein of deep feeling that prefers to evade the heart of the matter, and in English theater you can find that obliqueness in both Noel Coward and Harold Pinter. Does anyone come away from
Brief Encounter
unaware of its depth of feelings? There are times when it seems nothing less than a film about hysteria and the dysfunction between a stiff upper lip and a mind turning to jelly. The best English movies often play with masking their feelings, so it's a shock, at the end of
The Red Shoes
, when Lermontov shrieks with distress that Victoria Page is dead. Michael Powell's films are full of emotional autocrats who use cruelty or rudeness as a mask.

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
.