Academy Award Theater - Brief Encounter (11-20-46)

Academy Award Theater - The list of films and actors on Academy Award Theater is very impressive. Bette Davis begins the series in Jezebel, with Ginger Rogers following in Kitty Foyle, and then Paul Muni in The Life of Louis Pasteur. The Informer had to have Victor Mclaglen, and the Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet (this movie was his first major motion picutre role) plus Mary Astor for the hat trick. Suspicion starred Cary Grant with Ann Todd doing the Joan Fontaine role, Ronald Coleman in Lost Horizon, and Joan Fontaine and John Lund were in Portrait of Jenny. How Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio were done is something to hear!

THIS EPISODE:
Brief Encounter (1946) is director David Lean's brilliantly-crafted, classic British masterpiece. It is one of the greatest romantic tearjerkers/weepers of all time, with a very downbeat ending. Lean's film is a simple but realistically-honest, unsentimental, self-told social melodrama of the quiet desperation involved in an illicit, extra-marital love affair between two married, middle-class individuals over seven weekly meetings, mostly against the backdrop of a railway station. The romantic couple includes a wife/mother looking for escape from her humdrum life and sterile marriage, and a dashing doctor. tale of The screenplay was adapted and based on playwright Noel Coward's 1935 short one-act (half-hour) stage play Still Life. It was expanded from five short scenes in a train station (the refreshment tea room of Milford Junction Station) to include action in other settings (the married woman's house, the apartment of the married man's friend, restaurants, parks, train compartments, shops, a car, a boating lake and at the cinema), although the film still maintains chaste minimalism.