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This chapter introduces the idea of Brief Encounter’s remarkable after-life. It outstrips other notable films in the varied ways in which it has persisted in the collective memory. Some of these ways will prove more trivial than others but all will contribute the book’s central contention.
Several earlier novels as well as some other earlier films had adumbrated the central conflict of Brief Encounter. Perhaps it was the sheer ordinariness of the protagonists and how they are performed by less well-known actors that made such a strong appeal. By comparison with the film, the Coward play from which it is adapted appears limited and somewhat stiff.
Chapter 2 offers a necessary account of the film’s narrative content and how this is structured. It also deals with Coward’s uncredited contribution to the screenplay. Though the war is not mentioned, and the period of the film is unspecified, its resonance in relation to the months near the end of the war is considered here in a general atmosphere of emotions being submitted to more than usual strain. Matters of class, the casting of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard and the critical reception are also raised here against the 1945 background. When it was first released, the film did not attract universal plaudits, but it did find some national and international critical favour.
In the disastrous 1974 remake of Brief Encounter, almost every aspect goes wrong. The casting of glamorous international stars reduces the sense of ordinary people facing emotional conflict, and the structural change also undermines this. The short gay take on the original, Flames of Passion, offered a wordless version, which found some festival favour but not general release.
Radio versions, drawn from the film not the preceding play, attracted many well-known actors. There were also two plays and an opera bearing the film’s title and narrative outline, the opera stage perhaps less amenable to the intimacy that was part of the film’s appeal. The Kneehigh Company’s production was especially imaginative in its use of mixed-media resources. The TV film, Staying On, saw Johnson and Howard reunited in an Indian-set tale with some details that recall the old film, at least for the cognoscenti.
By ‘quoting’ from the film is meant that scenes from the 1945 black-and-white classic are inserted into the films’ narratives or, in the case of The History Boys, the last moments of Brief Encounter are acted out by some film-mad schoolboys. When Lean’s film is being quoted, there is discussion about which excerpts are inserted into the new film – and just how the chosen excerpt bears on the rest of the film. This chapter considers the specific episodes ‘quoted’ in the relevant films, the point in the narrative of the film concerned at which such episodes are glimpsed on screens large or small, and how this quotation reflects on the moments of its insertion. It can even be used for comedy, as in The History Boys or the TV series Shameless.
As distinct from those films that directly ‘quote’ from Brief Encounter, there are many more that seem in various ways to echo it. We can’t know to what extent the filmmakers involved had Brief Encounter in mind, but the fact is that its essential scenario and moral core still retain their emotional power, despite the shifts in cultural mores, irresistibly suggesting the long shadow it casts. Those titles considered here involve, to varying degrees, a relationship whose outcome foregrounds the conflict of desire and – what? – convention, other obligations, decency and other circumstantial and/or moral pressures that one or both protagonists take into consideration. It is not simply a matter of ‘duty’ but, as well, a real concern for the well-being of other people and for one’s own self-respect, the two being intricately connected in Brief Encounter. And there are recurring images, visual and aural, that recall the old film.
The phrase ‘brief encounter’ had been in very modest use since the 1860s, according to one source, but in the same source’s graphing of the usage it was seen to soar from the mid 1940s, reaching another high peak as late as 2010. Not just in the UK, but the US, Australia and even Hong Kong have drawn on the resonant title for TV items. Numerous minor variants of the title, such as A Brief Encounter and Brief Encounters, indicate the prolificacy of this particular phenomenon. It seems unlikely that any other film title has given rise to such seemingly endless repetition, albeit in often punning titles. Some of the episodes make comic capital from their references to Lean’s film, recalling its central narrative as well as its title.
This chapter records some of the numerous references to the film, either by invoking the title to make a point about the emotional conflicts involved, or in more sustained situations. The latter include a witty advertising film for refrigerators and a potter’s enactment of a scene between two lovers who raise their coffee mugs that are engraved to reveal emotional responses. The range of such allusions, along with many usages of the title in novels and reviews of yet other books, reinforces our sense of the far from still life of the movie.
Railway stations provide the setting for meetings and departures. Trains roaring through contrast with the bleakness of an empty platform after farewells have been made. Several UK stations have drawn on Brief Encounter as a name for refreshment rooms. Carnforth Station, now described as ‘The Home of Brief Encounter’, has made a major tourist attraction out of its contact with the actual filming of the night scenes there. It replicates the film’s tea room, screens the film daily, and has a shop full of souvenir artefacts of the film.