2025 FILM SERIES: The Epic David Lean

Brief Encounter (1945, 87min)

Linda DeLibero, senior lecturer and special advocate for alumni and outreach, and former director of the JHU film and media studies program

“It’s about a woman, married with two children, who meets by chance a man in a railway waiting-room and they fall in love. And it’s All No Good.” Thus Celia Johnson, star of David Lean’s final collaboration with Noël Coward, described the deceptively simple plot of Brief Encounter. In fact, no synopsis could do justice to this exquisitely wrought gem, which, in a mere 87 minutes limns every agonizing nuance of star-crossed love ever committed to the screen. Those familiar only with the director’s legendary epics will here discover a Lean equally brilliant at painting on a miniature canvas. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) and Laura Jesson (Johnson) are ordinary people caught in the grip of an extraordinary passion in drab pre-WW II London, a scenario more typical of Coward’s domain than Lean’s. But the vain struggle against intractable convention, British or otherwise, should ring a familiar bell with those who admire the director’s epic heroes, and Lean’s visual style summons every subtlety, every tension from what might have lapsed into cliché in lesser hands. On its release, Brief Encounter became an instant classic in Britain and made Trevor Howard an overnight star, but the film belongs to Johnson, whose portrayal of a woman torn between her sense of duty and a chance at happiness has few equals in the annals of onscreen heartbreak. 

The summer film series is created in partnership with The Renaissance Institute.

$10 fee for guests or $40 for six films (No fee for ASG/RI members, or ASG subscribers)