General comment
What speaks volumes is that after the passage of sixty-five years, a black and white "little" picture should incite as many and as passionately stated views. What emerges from the numerous ripostes are the many filters art must pass through in each observer. Some of the differences in the perspectives I have read appear to me to be generational. I was two years old when this motion picture was released. Mores do not change overnight, so I understand both the way things were and how they became. In discussing "Brief Encounter," one can argue for all sorts of fine points of social constraints, homosexual tensions, and eroticism in Trevor Howard’s grip on Celia Johnson’s shoulder. I saw none of these; perhaps because I saw two people who became caught up in a state of affairs as old as humanity itself. It is just this timelessness of their dilemma which makes this movie as perduring as it is. And make no mistake that their tension is owed to quaint and Victorian conditioning. The facts are quite well in on the dissolutive effects of broken homes on the greater society. There was more at risk in these two people running off into a pretty sunset than obsolescent mores. There were children and spouses and perhaps extended families. At work in these two intelligent and sensitive souls was the impossiblity of reconciling their feelings for each other with the deadly harm to others which would come of them. "Brief Encounter" remains a powerful drama after more than half a century because it exerts a tension upon any viewer of any time who has a fair amount of circumspection. An amoral observer is doomed to miss the full impact of this immensely wonderful achievement.
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