A Propos de Milford Junction

Reflections on Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)

NOTE: If you are not familiar with Brief Encounter, a summary of the plot can be read at the foot of this blogpost.

Now and then
One of the many strands of Queen Elizabeth the Second’s efforts to refresh the popularity of the hereditary monarchy was to have herself schooled to speak less like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.
 
In this she may have done Brief Encounter and other British films of the 1940s a reputational favour, the much derided and often satirised vowels sounds and clipped enunciation of middle-class speech of the era having receded, by the first quarter of the twenty-first century, into a tolerated generality of anachronistic curiosities such as gramophones, men always wearing hats in the street, and the existence of manual telephone exchanges.
 
Brief Encounter’s success in identifying and communicating the anguish and joy of what it feels like to fall in love with someone you shouldn't have fallen in love with seems to have helped it to transcend the superficial internal obstacles to its own longevity. Nevertheless, it’s extraordinary to consider that it was released a mere decade and a half before, for example, A Taste of Honey (Richardson, 1961), which we would in the main identify as a modern film emerging from a social perspective close our own.
 
David Lean’s film, made in 1944-5 but set outside wartime, concerns two married people in their mid-thirties, at that time regarded as early middle-age — Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) — who meet by chance and fall in love.

Made and released in the edge-time between the war of attrition in Europe beginning to resolve and the hostilities actually ending, Brief Encounter was always slightly adrift in historical time. Accounts of the shoot record that wartime rationing dictated that some of the food and packaging required to stock the railway refreshment room set was unobtainable and had to be made up as props, and Noel Coward, producer of the film and author of its source stage play, was away entertaining allied troops during most of the shoot.
 
Co-written as well as produced by Coward, the film takes place in a vague ‘not very long ago but before the war’ time-loop. Two squaddies in uniform travelling on military warrants appear briefly in the station refreshment room demanding, but being denied, alcoholic drink. Cinema audiences in 1945/6 would be familiar with encountering whole trainloads of such conscripts, and some would have been part of the audience. There is a passing visual reference to the 1914-18 conflict when the distraught and rain-soaked Laura sits on a park bench near to an elevated war memorial that conspicuously features a phallic bronze machine gun looming menacingly above her. And 1940s audiences would likely have noticed that among the objects at her young son’s bedside is a model plane marked with RAF roundels.
 
The disruption and potential destruction of the marriages of Laura and husband Fred (Cyril Raymond) and of Alec and his wife Madeleine could be seen as analogous to the disruption about to be caused by the Second World War to the stable, class-entrenched, lives and habits of both the middle-class and working-class characters within the story. At the conclusion of the film Fred believes that his and Laura’s lives have returned to a normality that he seems only dimly to have realised had just been under existential threat. But we, the audience, know that for Laura this is a ‘new normal’ and, however much she may wish it, she will never be the same person she was before she met and loved Alec.
 
“There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this anymore, when I can look back quite peacefully and cheerfully and say how silly I was”, she says. But we know that she doesn’t want that time to ever come, and neither do we. The question that we know will remain with Laura at the end of the film is the same as the question that haunted Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War and of Covid19 — having been through all that, will the survivors build the new normal to be better than the old one, or worse?

There’s an often-noted degree of slipperiness about where the film takes place. The geographical relationship between ‘Milford’, the substantial town where Alec and Laura meet and conduct their affair, Laura’s home in ‘Ketchworth’, and Alec’s in ‘Churley’ is sufficiently indicated for narrative purposes — how could it not be when the entire plot is dictated by the passage of trains to and from these places. The destination signboards seen at the platform location on Carnforth station place the action indisputably in the north of England, but the working-class accents of the railway and refreshment room staff are southern, including Myrtle (Joyce Carey), who affects a faux-refined attempt at middle-class diction and syntax.
 
Apart from the railway platform scenes, the Milford town exteriors were mainly shot on locations in southern England, and this would have been obvious to anyone in a contemporary audience who paused to consider the question. So the film, although broadly a realist undertaking, is not attempting geographical verisimilitude or coherence. It substantially takes place in Laura’s anguished and exhausted mind as she imagines a confession of the affair that she is unable to make out loud to her husband, and never will. 

I am a camera - Laura's reflection breaks the fourth wall

Railway timetables and the occurrence of Thursday afternoons dictate absolutely what is possible for Alec and Laura, but broader calendar time is left unspecified. Laura’s children squabble about whether they should be taken to the pantomime or the circus but nobody mentions Christmas, although the eagle-eyed may spot that a poster for a British Legion event in the background of one shot features a graphic icon of Christmas trees. So the action probably unfolds during January and February, and possibly into early March. At the boating lake where Alec, a hopeless rower, eventually falls in and gets his trousers soaked, the lovers at first find the boats shut away for the season, but a suitably picturesque boatman is nevertheless in his nearby shed and they are able to persuade him to open up.
 
There are Thursdays when the sun shines, but the trees are bare and almost everyone wears a raincoat or overcoat and scarf. “Cold?”, Alec asks Laura during a brief afternoon trip into the countryside. “Not really”, she diffidently responds, having more crucial matters on her mind. Every room we see has a lighted open fire or a stove in it, although, curiously, the sash windows in the Jesson’s living room (“library”) and their children’s bedroom are partly open, causing the curtains to billow.

“One can’t really expect spring at this time of year, can one?” remarks Mrs Hermione Rowlandson (Lorna Davey), one of a gossipy pair of acquaintances who have unfortuitously observed Laura and Alec enjoying a champagne lunch in a smart Milford hotel.
 
So Laura and Alec’s affair takes place in an all-purpose generic England during an all-purpose generic winter, a southern English winter that happens to take place in the North of England, a season that might be remembered in Milford for one or two heavy downpours, but really quite mild overall, since you ask. A familiar place and time inhabiting a cosy, blurred, nostalgic national memory. The old normal.

Eye care - Joyce Carey, Stanley Holloway, Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard

Strange Disruptor
An element of the film that most of today’s audience might perceive in a more nuanced way than many of its original viewers is the brief but crucially disruptive appearance of the character of Stephen Lynn (Valentine Dyall, uncredited). As played by Dyall, Stephen presents a disturbing and slightly uncanny embodiment of Laura’s guilt and of the prevailing middle-class anxiety and hypocrisy around sex, sexuality, divorce, and behavioural conformity.
 
The scene between Alec and Stephen after Laura has fled from Stephen’s flat is, as Richard Dyer points out (Brief Encounter, BFI. 1998), the only scene in the film that appears to be a significant event at which Laura is not present and so cannot have detailed knowledge.
 
We might consider the scene, therefore, either as being narrated to us directly by the filmmakers (suspending Laura from her otherwise ubiquitous narrative role) or, and more likely, as Laura’s imaginative conjuring of the event in the light of Alec’s retrospective reassurance that “[Stephen] doesn’t know who you are… …We didn’t speak of you. We spoke of some nameless creature who has no reality at all.”

Curious friend - Valentine Dyall as Stephen Lynn

​Laura has never met Stephen Lynn and so, on this reading, it’s in effect Laura’s unconscious that has decided that Stephen looks and sounds like the actor Valentine Dyall. Maybe this is why he seems to have migrated from a noirish gangster movie that Laura may have seen on a Thursday afternoon at the Palladium in Milford, a blackmailer or a pimp.
 
We are told that Stephen is the “chief physician” at Milford hospital and a long-term friend of Alec who graduated at the same time. Stephen lives alone in a service apartment equipped with a convenient back exit through the kitchen and down the fire-escape. We might reasonably conjecture that Alec and Laura are not alone in having utilised this facility when disturbed.
 
The flat, whose staircase and lift we see as well as its interior, is modern in its architecture and furnishings, contrasting with the stifling chintzy clutter of Laura and Fred’s living room and the Victorian vernacular of the station refreshment room. This might suggest a tenant with modern attitudes who would be relatively relaxed and tolerant of Alec’s affair, or at the very least willing to bring some sympathetic understanding to the situation. And Stephen’s opening words, at least at face value in the script, suggest that this is the case: “I'm the one who should apologize for returning so inopportunely… we've been friends for years and I am the most broad-minded of men.” But Dyall’s smirking, waspishly sarcastic delivery of the lines, his general demeanour, and the way in which he is shot, suggest suppressed rage. “I’m not angry, just disappointed” he hisses, by way of a farewell to Alec.
 
Stephen Lynn, whose surname assonates with “sin”, is the only character in the film who it’s possible to imagine being played by Noel Coward himself. It’s worth replaying the scene’s audio and imagining Coward’s hooded eyes and permanently ironic countenance in place of Dyall’s, and his contemptuous, arm’s length flicking of Laura’s abandoned scarf.
 
Alec has evidently not told Stephen why he wanted to borrow his car for the afternoon. There must surely be at least a suspicion that Stephen had a very good idea why, and he has in effect set a trap for Alec and deliberately arrived home early feigning illness, having perhaps watched his own residence from outside.
 
Some commentators read Stephen as a gay character, of necessity closeted by the legal and social climate of the times. Following this interpretation, Stephen may regard Alec’s marriage as a convenient alibi against any suspicion of improper desire for his friend and colleague, but see the affair with Laura as a threat to his continuing access to Alec’s company. When he bursts into his own flat, apparently lingering in the front lobby without removing his overcoat but nevertheless long enough to be spared actually setting eyes on Laura, and he confronts Alec, is it barely supressed jealousy we are seeing played out?

Hat trick - Laura waylaid by the inquisitive Hermione and Mary

Rising star - Irene Handl levitates serenely from the orchestra pit

Linger on
Why does the film have enduring popularity such that multiple spin-off versions, commercial opportunities, and popular cultural references persist? For all that the cinematic telling of the story entails a sophisticated narrative device, the extended flashback has long been a familiar trick and ultimately Brief Encounter tells a very simple, familiar, story with broadly sketched and easily distinguishable secondary characters. On this level it is straightforward and entertaining viewing, but on an emotional level it relentlessly wrestles at our identification with the central protagonists.
 
Today’s viewer would have little difficulty discovering reasons to avoid too close an identification with Laura and Alec. The narrow, casual snobbishness which makes them see the banter of the refreshment room staff and the figure of a plump, bespectacled, jobbing musician (Irene Handl) as objects of casual amusement is uncomfortable. Laura demands brandy, writing paper, and the postponement of closing time from the kindly Beryl, the most engaging and profoundly portrayed of the Milford Junction staff, with just sufficient entitled curtesy to obtain what she wants and with minimum eye contact.
 
Laura and Fred’s household apparently includes a uniformed maid who is at least a daily fixture and may possibly live in, and the couple have a routine of dressing for dinner. At first sight it’s difficult to square this with the fact that at the cinema Laura regards sitting in the circle rather than the stalls as something of an extravagance. She hesitates guiltily about spending so much money on Fred’s birthday present, a clock that she is sure he will love, thereby reminding us that the money comes from Fred in the first place. This is the sort of performative frugality that is guaranteed to irk those who find themselves in no position to indulge in it.

​We never see Alec’s wife Madelaine or their children, and so are let off the hook of emotional engagement or identification with them. We learn that Madelaine is “delicate”, which in the 1940s could mean any number of things, including that she has lost interest in sex with Alec. The central love affair is narrated in minute detail from Laura’s point of view — we can only glean what Alec is thinking and feeling via Laura’s perceptions and what we see of his words and actions. Partly because of Trevor Howard’s slightly detached screen persona and partly because we never occupy Alec’s head as we do Laura’s, it’s possible to interpret Alec’s motivations and character through a range of readings, some more charitable than others.
 
And yet…
 
Alec and Laura are clearly passionately attracted to each other physically and their on-off resistance to their urges was puzzling to some people even at the time (not least, apparently, to a bemused Trevor Howard) and may be incomprehensible to later generations. Laura, of course, has more to risk than Alec and we are reminded of this by a reference during the refreshment room staff banter to “getting a girl into trouble”. But all this is part of the point. The film insists that the affair remains unconsummated because the film needs that to be the case. Because the affair must remain, for the characters and the viewer, an encounter. Brief — “Nothing lasts really, not even life” – but enduringly deep, irresistible and indestructible.

​While long term devotees of Brief Encounter may enjoy recalling snatches of the dialogue…
“I’m sure I don’t know to what you are referring.”
“I'll forgive you if you'll forgive me.”
…anyone who has seen it even once will surely include three things in their recollection:  a soft-focus memory of Celia Johnson’s exquisitely photographed features, the reprise, again and again, of the yearning, swelling, melodies of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto, and the inexorable iron and steam rhythm of the railway whose relentless timetable both enables and threatens the lovers.
 
The appeal of steam trains now that, in Britain at any rate, they are almost only found in our collective memory of cinema, holds confusing and contradictory connotations. But one of them whispers insistently to us, “You know what's happened, don't you? I've fallen in love with you.”
 
The concluding shot of the film has Laura in her armchair, her sewing basket in her lap, and a grateful Fred kneeling beside her and then leaning in, interposing himself between the camera and her face, all but eradicating her image.
 
But we’re not completely done yet. Rachmaninov surges to full volume for one final time. Then the end title is superimposed on a still showing a deserted Milford Junction with glinting railway tracks stretching away out of the darkness towards a dazzling brightness — a cinema screen perhaps, offering infinite possibilities for other stories of chance meetings and irresistible love.
 
Pass me a tissue, would you. I think there’s something in my eye.

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Story and plot structure: an outline of Brief Encounter
The film recounts a passionate but unconsummated love affair between two married people, Laura Jesson and Alec Harvey, who meet by chance in a railway refreshment room. The story is told from Laura’s point of view, using interior monologue during a long flashback within a framing device that shows us the lovers’ final meeting after they have decided to conclusively end their affair.
 
Laura lives with her husband Fred and their two children in the village of Ketchworth. Every Thursday she travels by train to the town of Milford to shop, change her library book, and sometimes go to the cinema. Alec is a doctor, a General Practitioner, in Churley, a place situated in the opposite direction to Ketchworth. On Thursdays Alec also travels to Milford, to provide cover at the hospital for a friend and colleague, Stephen Lynn. Both Laura and Alec are in the habit of having a cup of tea in the Milford Junction refreshment room as they wait for their respective trains home at the end of the afternoon.
 
The refreshment room also serves to introduce us to a group of railway and refreshment room staff who provide both an entertaining background to Alec and Laura’s meetings and a colourful and robust working-class counterpoint to the guilt and tight-lipped restraint of the middle-class lovers.
 
The pair first encounter one another at Milford Junction station when Laura gets a piece of railway grit in her eye and Alec removes it for her, necessitating a moment of close proximity and eye contact. Following a further chance meeting in the town the following Thursday, their affair rapidly develops with visits to the cinema and to restaurants, although Laura is troubled by guilt at her betrayal of her kindly but dull husband and with fear of discovery when they are seen by local acquaintances.
 
One Thursday, Alec borrows Stephen Lynn’s car and drives Laura out to the country for the afternoon. Returning the car after dark, Alec says that he has arranged to return the key to Stephen’s flat, to which he has been lent the latchkey, and asks Laura to come up with him. She refuses and makes her way to the station and boards her train, but at the last second jumps off and returns to the flat, although only intending to stay for a short while so she can remain in Alec’s company a little longer. They hear Stephen arriving at the door and Laura flees by a back exit and wanders the rainy streets of Milford for hours.
 
The humiliation and guilt triggered by this incident determines Laura to end the affair. Alec reluctantly agrees and decides to accept a job he has been offered in Johannesberg, but they agree to end the affair gently and amicably.
 
As Laura and Alec spend their last moments together in the Milford Junction refreshment room, they are interrupted by Dolly, an insensitive and tediously voluble acquaintance, a moment we have seen out of context at the beginning of the film. Alec’s train is announced and he leaves, a discreet gesture of placing his hand on Laura’s shoulder his only means of a meaningful farewell*. Laura hopes he will return, having not caught his train, but he does not appear. In despair she rushes onto the platform to throw herself in front of an express train but is unable to do so. The framing device loop thus closed, the final moments of the film return to domesticity and involve, at last, a recognition by Fred that his wife has been troubled, distant, and in need of his support but has now returned to him, reconciled to the norms of marital fidelity.

*Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015) employs a very similar framing device and references Brief Encounter’s hand on the shoulder moment, but goes on to an optimistic and liberating conclusion.