
Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard meet by chance at a railway station (Milford Junction). Both are married and neither will stoop to impropriety. Yet there is an immediate attraction and a series of stolen lunch dates develops into one of the cinema’s most affecting love affairs. It was David Lean who hit on the flashback structure which takes Noel Coward’s one-act play out of the station, and for all the lovers’ stiff upper lip rectitude this is where the filmmaker’s romantic inclinations blossomed (Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 2 does the rest). In a funny way it’s very In the Mood for Love, 1945 edition.
Nominated for three Academy Awards (Best Director, Best Actress and Best Screenplay) the film won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Today it is considered one of the greatest British films ever made.
Lean’s sad, buttoned-up account of unconsummated love is about all of us and our cautious natures.
Zadie Smith
One of the most vivid, impassioned and painfully believable love stories ever committed to celluloid.
Tom Huddleston, Time Out
David Lean
Trevor Howard, Celia Johnson
UK
1945
English
Grand Prix, Cannes
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Producer
Noël Coward
Screenwriter
David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan
Cinematography
Robert Krasker
Editor
Jack Harris
Original Music
Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2
Art Director
L. P. Williams
Also Playing
To a Land Unknown
In this outstanding crime drama, two Palestinian cousins are exiled in Athens and in dire need of funds for fake passports to move their family to Germany. A slippery slope of moral compromise awaits as they resort to human smuggling and hostage-taking.
Drop Dead City
New York, 1975. The city is minutes away from bankruptcy and President Gerald Ford wants no part of it. Sanitation workers are on strike and cops are telling tourists it's not safe to visit. The town is going up in flames and they can't pay the firemen.
Sinners
This year's unexpected box office sleeper is that rare beast, a genre movie full of bold invention and surprise. We are in Mississippi in the early 1930s, and the opening of a new blues joint on the edge of town is the signal for all hell to break out.