Anniversary of the Brief Encounter
On November 19, 1945, the premiere of David Lean's melodrama "Brief Encounter" took place in London.
The script for the film was based on a one-act play by British playwright Noel Coward entitled "Still Life". In England in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a very fashionable genre that today we might call "theatrical serial". For several days, one-act performances were shown to the audience, three or four per evening, the duration of each, as a rule, did not exceed 30 minutes.
In 1935, Noel Coward wrote a series of 10 one-act plays under the general title "Tonight at 8:30". He himself staged performances based on these plays, he himself performed some roles in some of them. This "theatrical series" premiered at the Phoenix Theater in London's West End on May 18, 1936. The series, titled Tonight at 8:30, was so successful that in November of that same year it appeared on the Broadway stage.
While the performance “Tonight at 8:30” was a success with the audience, the question of a film adaptation was not raised. And then... And then the war began. Noel Coward left the theater to head the British Propaganda Bureau in Paris. When France was occupied by German troops, Coward returned to London, where he continued his work as a war propagandist. In this capacity, he wrote the script for the film “In Which We Serve” and was going to direct a film based on this script. However, realizing the lack of experience in cinema, he offered to share the director's chair with David Lean. By that time, Lean also had no experience as a film director, but as an editor, by the early 40s he had participated in the creation of 24 films, including the famous “Pygmalion” (1938). The joint creation of novice film directors Coward and Lean was released in September 1942 and was very successful both as an artistic and propaganda work.
As soon as there was confidence that the end of the war, and a victorious end, was just around the corner, the established creative duo David Lean - Noel Coward began creating paintings on topics far from military. In 1944, this duo created two films and decided to film one of the parts of the above-mentioned “theatrical series”, namely the part called “Still Life”. For this purpose, jointly by Noel Coward and David Lean, with the involvement of two more professional screenwriters, they converted a one-act play into a feature-length film script. As a result, in January 1945, filming began on a film called “Brief Encounter.” In May of the same year, shortly after Victory Day, filming was completed.
In September 1946, David Lean's film "Brief Encounter" was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1st Cannes International Film Festival. True, of the 44 nominees for this award, 11 films, that is, every fourth, received this award. But it should be noted that, for example, George Cukor's "Gaslight" or Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious" did not receive this award. And in 1947, the film "Brief Encounter" received three Oscar nominations, but did not win a single one. In one of the most important nominations - Best Director - David Lean lost to William Wyler, director of the film "The Best Years of Our Lives".
Film critics greeted David Lean's picture very warmly. Even the eternally disgruntled Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote in his review:
"An uncommonly good little picture and one which is frankly designed to appeal to that group of film-goers who are provoked by the "usual movie tripe"".
The famous American director Robert Altman assessed the film in about the same spirit. His wife, Katherine, recalled:
"One day, years and years ago, just after the war, (Robert) had nothing to do and he went to a theater in the middle of the afternoon to see a movie. Not a Hollywood movie: a British movie. He said the main character was not glamorous, not a babe. And at first he wondered why he was even watching it. But twenty minutes later he was in tears, and had fallen in love with her. And it made him feel that it wasn't just a movie."
The famous Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev called this film
"one of the most amazing and heartfelt melodramas in the history of cinema."
It is no coincidence that one of the scenes in this film later inspired Billy Wilder to create the film "The Apartment".
The film was not shown in the Soviet Union. However, in Ireland, the censorship committee also banned the screening of this film because of his, the film, sympathy for adultery. And in France, to the surprise of the producers, the film also faced a very cautious attitude from film distributors. However, after the success of the film at the Cannes Film Festival, distributors' fears disappeared, and the film enjoyed great success with French cinema audiences.
Among modern moviegoers, David Lean's film "Brief Encounter" was also highly appreciated, and not only by ordinary people, but also by representatives of the highest aristocracy. So, Paul Burrell, the butler of Princess Diana, in an interview said that this film was the most favorite of the princess.
70% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film ratings from 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of David Lean's film "Brief Encounter" according to FilmGourmand was 8,569, which allowed it to take 297th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
