Like so many others of a romantic bent, I have a thing about railways, or at least train journeys — and railway stations. Transient places. And right from the beginning, Brief Encounter (1945) has this in spades: the opening shots in crisp black and white of a steam engine, billowing steam and smoke, the chiaroscuro effect, the play on light. Lovely cinematography. Put it this way, would Brief Encounter (1945) be the same if, by some form of eccentric time warp, it had been set in a motorway service station or in a modern railway station, with its electric and diesel locomotives? Which is exactly the setting for the Anglo-Italian remake of 1974, starring an unlikely Richard Burton and Sophia Loren finding love over a British Rail sandwich — a film described by Australian critic, Brian MacFarlane, as ‘a complete disaster’, which, with hindsight, is, perhaps, a tiny bit unfair — for despite its bizarre casting, and strange premise, it has period charm — and Burton has presence.
No. It’s to 1945 we must return. To the Home Counties. Or at least, I think, that’s when and where Brief Encounter is supposed to be set? Or possibly the late 1930s. It’s a bit vague. Brief Encounter was filmed at Denham Studios just before the end of the war. And by April 1945, blackout restrictions had been lifted. You will know the plot. Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) is a nice middle-class housewife with a nice middle-class life. Which means two obedient, plummy children; a husband who’s more interested in his pipe and The Times crossword, a housemaid, nicotined tweeds, and a nice suburban house. With a standard lamp, a radiogram, and a subscription to Radio Times. It’s an organised, if slightly dull life, and Laura fills her days with visits to the Boots Lending Library, matinées at the Art Deco cinema, and presumably, although this might be an anachronism on my part, coffee mornings with her gossipy friends. And then, waiting for her train back home, in the Milford station refreshment room, she meets smooth doctor, Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), who extracts a bit of grit from her eye. The rest, of course, is history.
Brief Encounter was directed by David Lean, with a screenplay by Noël Coward based on his one-act play, Still Life (1936). The station, which, I think, is supposed to be in the South, or the Midlands somewhere (the LMS designation suggests a suburban area to the North of London), was actually filmed at Carnforth, in Lancashire, enhanced by some impressively realistic sets from Denham Studios. The High Street scene (s) with its Mock Tudor parade was filmed at New Beaconsfield, in South Buckinghamshire — close to Denham studios and convenient for joint-producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan (then married to film star Valerie Hobson, later Profumo), who lived in nearby Gerrard’s Cross. Beaconsfield is still recognisable today: the Mock Tudor bits still look the same, although the shop fronts have changed drastically, with the changing demographic. R.C. Weller, the butcher, is now a hipster café, serving quinoa, confit tomato and smoked pineapple chipotle, while the shop next door (possibly an old-fashioned jeweller?) is now a charity shop for Age Concern. The Britain of 1945 seems like a very different place from the Britain of 2025. Eighty years apart.
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