A not-so Brief Encounter

Is Brief Encounter Britain’s greatest film? According to the BFI’s most recent Best British Films poll, sadly not (it takes the number two spot, just behind Carol Reed’s The Third Man). It might, however, be the most British. 

A veritable cavalcade of tea, trains and cakes with their names taken from historic Oxfordshire market towns, Celia Johnson’s glass-cutting accent is only the icing on the film’s multi-tiered Victoria Sponge. No wonder it’s been parodied to high heaven in the years since its release - though usually, it must be said, with love.

Because even 80 years after it first made its way into cinemas, people love Brief Encounter. Its story of forbidden love - of housewife Laura (Celia Johnson) and doctor Alec (Trevor Howard) and their chance meeting in a railway refreshment room - is as universal today as it was in 1945.

Its Britishness is even a significant part of its charm; its rose-tinted view of a lost middle class lifestyle captures the sort of nostalgia that’s become our national trademark. The Britain on display is a chocolate box of chintz armchairs, Boots lending libraries and professional classes. That this sense of order and restraint proves a nightmare for our two protagonists is almost irrelevant. David Lean’s adaptation of Coward’s 1936 short play (Still Life, presented as one of ten plays in Coward’s ambitious compendium, Tonight at 8:30) just oozes cosy, weepy charm. 

Perhaps it’s lasted so long because, to use a well-worn phrase, ‘twas ever thus. Filmed during the last year of the Second World War and released just months after it had concluded - with rationing and grief still central facets of British life - the film pointedly refuses to reveal the exact year in which it was set. Our collective trip to Milford Junction instead takes place in a nebulous period at the end of the 1930s.

So even at the time of its release, Brief Encounter was dealing in nostalgia. When Laura’s chatterbox friend, Everley Gregg’s Dolly, buys two enormous bars of chocolate, she’s doing so in front of an audience who wouldn’t get un-rationed access to the stuff until 1953. When two soldiers start causing mischief in Myrtle (Joyce Carey)’s cafe, they’re treated more with suspicion than war-era reverence and respect. At every turn, the film tries to present itself as the antithesis of wartime living. It’s pure escapism not just to our modern eyes, but to those of audiences past as well.

For many watching in the 21st century, Brief Encounter will be their first experience of Coward’s writing. It’s an odd introduction, and one not entirely representative of his other best-known works - Private Lives, Hay Fever and Blithe Spirit. Capping off the BFI’s recent programme, Too Much: Melodrama on Screen, it’s a genre which Coward was undeniably familiar with (see page 18 for our look at his 1929 operetta, Bitter Sweet, or back to page four for Cavalcade). But the Coward works most often produced in theatres today are almost always his comedies, and though Brief Encounter has its amusing moments (“Now look at me Banburys - all over the floor” rarely fails to raise a laugh) it’s a story more likely to bring a tear to the eye than a chuckle to the throat.    

Perhaps this is why, of all the Coward-Lean partnerships, it’s Brief Encounter and war drama In Which We Serve which have survived longest in the public imagination. It’s this film in particular which finds both men operating slightly outside their respective comfort zones - Lean would go on to make his name with huge, action-packed epics like Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai, a far-cry from the confines of a Home Counties railway station (filmed in Lancashire) and its suburban environs. 

Both bring something not often found in the melodramatic genre. Coward’s witty dialogue provides a foil to make the emotional beats hit all the harder, while Lean’s frustration at remaining in Coward’s shadow (this was the final of four films the pair would make together) adds to the sense of yearning shared by his characters. The moment Laura decides to abscond with Alec to his friend’s flat - the steam rushing past a series of slamming train doors - has an urgency to it that elevates the film beyond its potentially placid rhythms. 

Today, though, Brief Encounter serves best as a kind of time capsule for an era which never really existed in the first place. In its own self-contained little universe, it offers an escapism and a wash of nostalgia as potent now as in 1945. Its second life as an endemic part not just of British, but global, popular culture allows it to surprise and comfort in equal measure. Perhaps Celia Johnson’s wonderfully expressive eyes are wider than you remember; maybe this time you’ll hear Coward’s cameo on the station tannoy system. It’s a film which, even watching for the first time, manages to be both incredibly familiar and entirely new. It might not be the “best” British film; but for that reason it may, paradoxically, be the most perfect.

James Harvey is a film journalist and writer.

This article originally appeared in Home Chat Magazine, December 2025.