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End of the affair not quite started, Bressonism of the stiff upper lip. "I love you with all my heart and soul." "I want to die." The housewife (Celia Johnson) is "a poetry addict," at the train station she gets a grit in her eye removed by the doctor (Trevor Howard), "a nice creature." Both are married but begin spending Thursdays together, an afternoon at the movies, a rowboat stopped by chains. While he talks about the dangers of inhaling coal dust, they realize they've fallen for each other. Passion, guilt, happiness, fear bumping into the British need to be sensible. "I didn't think such violent things could happen to ordinary people." David Lean's expansion of Noël Coward's playlet, a repressed state of mind replete with noir shadows. At home the heroine sits cozily before the husband (Cyril Raymond) with crossword puzzles, aboard the train she turns the window into a screen for lyrical fantasies. "Having committed the crime, I suddenly felt reckless and gay." Chaste characters and sensuousness of form, tidy folks alarmed at their own feelings, charging locomotives are still locked in their tracks. Keats and Rachmaninoff and of course an invocation of Tolstoy, plus a pair of Mozartian jesters in the salty stationmaster (Stanley Holloway) and the coquettish maid running the tea counter (Joyce Carey). The friend's vacant flat remembered by Wilder (The Apartment), the aborted rendezvous that cuts sharply to a downpour of shame. Inner and outer spaces, a distinct Lean theme given an exquisite early exploration, a question of going too far or not far enough. "Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance..." The cruelty of the furtive couple's last moments stolen by a prattling gossip, the devastating weight of a hand on a shoulder. Ophüls is closely related with Letter from an Unknown Woman, and there's Wong's In the Mood for Love. Cinematography by Robert Krasker. With Everley Gregg, Marjorie Mars, and Margaret Barton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |