Director: David Lean
Year Released: 1945
Rating: 3.5
There are basically two schools of thought with regard to this stodgy but memorable picture: the dismissive section that wonders why Dr. Trevor Howard and housewife Celia Johnson just don't fuck and get it over with and then there's the conservative group that find their doomed love to be romantic (don't we all have someone in our past that slipped away from us for one reason or another?). I confess that for the longest time I disliked this one - my first viewing was as a teenager and I (naturally) belonged to the dismissive group, finding the coyness and middle-class trappings to be excuses barring the way for true love to blossom (if you're unhappy at home, fix it! sleep with whomever you wish!) but this second viewing over a decade later changed my thinking. Maybe it's "maturity," maybe it's just an understanding that we have obligations to our loved ones that shouldn't be broken, and that it might be painful to live with the idea that one succumbed to temptation and betrayed one's spouse. What makes matters more complicated is the fact that Johnson's husband is a perfectly forgiving, understanding man: boring and predictable, true, but loyal - Johnson almost slips when she goes to the apartment with Howard, but that's when fate intervenes and has to stop them from taking it that step too far. Johnson's gloomy face - registering constant despair - is surely one of the more haunting (and haunted) visages in cinema.
