This week marks the one hundredth birthday of the late director David Lean. As Anthony Lane notes in The New Yorker, Lean is best remembered now as Mr. Spectacle for the epics he turned out in the last decades of his career (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, A Passage to India), but the onetime editor had earlier made his mark with a string of tight, emotionally compressed entertainments, including his terrific Dickens adaptations (Great Expectations and Oliver Twist) and a number of works derived from the writings of Noel Coward, who actually served as co-director of Lean's first job behind the camera, the 1942 In Which We Serve. They made for an intriguing team, with Coward's stylish reserve — the glorifying embodiment of the cliche of the "British stiff upper lip" — sometimes pressing against Lean's own show of restraint, which could seem prudish but which also sometimes felt as if it were barely keeping a lid on the rush of feelings that his work had flowing through it. As Lane points out, the definitive expression of this tension is their final collaboration, the 1945 Brief Encounter: "Its main event is what never happens: Laura (Celia Johnson), a married woman, does not have an affair with Alec (Trevor Howard), a married man, despite their being ardently in love. The film has been a favorite, almost a fetish, among British audiences ever since. This year, on Valentine’s Day, it was screened outside the National Theatre, in London, so that young lovers could sit in the cold, huddle together, and learn just how incredibly miserable the business of love can be. What other country would subscribe to this? The saga of thwartings is played out in the pleasure domes of suburbia: railway stations, luncheon tables, and boating lakes. For Lean, the humdrum was drenched in emotion... The couple first meet at a station and, unbearably, part there for the last time, with Alec’s hand resting briefly on Laura’s shoulder in the refreshment room. They have measured out their love in coffee spoons."
The station where the key romantic moments of Brief Encounter were shot is still there, and Kathryn Flett reports that she "took the opportunity to celebrate... with a visit to Carnforth railway station's refreshment room, ideally for a nice cup of tea and a Banbury, but not ruling out the possibility of getting some grit in my eye and having it removed by a kindly doctor who might just be the love of my life." She discovered that "There is now something of a Brief Encounter mini-industry at Carnforth, what with the famous clock, the visitors' centre and the delightful refreshment room — a replica of the set, which was itself a copy of the original." The tea room is managed by Andrew Coates and Helen Dytham, who didn't know about it place in film history when they first made the site's acquaintance; Coates hadn't even heard of the movie before. "They are up to speed now," writes Flett, reassuringly.