A beautiful classic love tragedy, originally from a play by Noel Coward, who collaborated with the director David Lean on the screenplay. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard are star-crossed lovers in a world which today seems quintessentially romantic - black-and-white steam trains and station cafés and upstending cheps in hets with cut-glass accents and incontrovertible dedication to duty.
Of course, at the time, the setting would have seemed more prosaic, and the whole film weaves an elaborate counterpoint beween the protagonists' passion and their circumstances. The heroine meets the hero on her regular Thursday shopping expedition to the nearest market town. They are both cosily married and don't know how to cope with the overwhelming delight they find themselves taking in each others' company. Their ensuing relationship is too restrainedly heroic for words and makes you want to jump into the screen and tear out the obstacles that get in their way.
All the emotions are magnified by the tremulous soundtrack of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, and simultaneously compressed down to explosion-intensity by the sheer Britishness of the protagonists. There are some things a chap doesn't do - but sometimes a chap is forced to do them. The performances are uniformly fabulous, from the charismatic hero and heroine to the station staff (watch out for Stanley Holloway, Audrey Hepburn's father in My Fair Lady). Celia Johnson in particular is stunning and makes her emotional conflict utterly believable through the make up and the monochrome and the decades.
You'll come away with your tears thoroughly jerked and Celia Johnson's enormous dark eyes emblazoned across your mind as she stares out into the rest of her life, intoning in clipped accents (but the more powerfully for that): "Only an overwhelming desire never to feel anything ever again."
Of course, at the time, the setting would have seemed more prosaic, and the whole film weaves an elaborate counterpoint beween the protagonists' passion and their circumstances. The heroine meets the hero on her regular Thursday shopping expedition to the nearest market town. They are both cosily married and don't know how to cope with the overwhelming delight they find themselves taking in each others' company. Their ensuing relationship is too restrainedly heroic for words and makes you want to jump into the screen and tear out the obstacles that get in their way.
All the emotions are magnified by the tremulous soundtrack of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, and simultaneously compressed down to explosion-intensity by the sheer Britishness of the protagonists. There are some things a chap doesn't do - but sometimes a chap is forced to do them. The performances are uniformly fabulous, from the charismatic hero and heroine to the station staff (watch out for Stanley Holloway, Audrey Hepburn's father in My Fair Lady). Celia Johnson in particular is stunning and makes her emotional conflict utterly believable through the make up and the monochrome and the decades.
You'll come away with your tears thoroughly jerked and Celia Johnson's enormous dark eyes emblazoned across your mind as she stares out into the rest of her life, intoning in clipped accents (but the more powerfully for that): "Only an overwhelming desire never to feel anything ever again."