Tonight’s offering is probably one of the greatest stories of unrequited love and forbidden attraction ever told.

Brief Encounter, made in 1945 and featuring some stunning monochrome camerawork by Robert Krasker the director of photography, is the story of a married woman’s temptation to cheat on her husband with a doctor whom she meets in a railway station cafe.

The film written by Noel Coward and starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as Laura Jesson and Dr. Alec Harvey is about a two people who accidentally meet and who become close during the regular trips that they both have to make to the town of Milford. Dr Harvey is there on medical business and Mrs Jesson is there for shopping. Over the course of a few weeks, Laura and Alec become attracted to one another and start going out together on a platonic basis to the cinema and restaurants in Milford. As time goes by they fall in love and start to have to work hard to prevent those who know them in Milford putting two and two together and wrecking both their home lives.

Both Laura and Alec are both happily married to other people and no matter how much they are attracted to each other neither wants to have the friendship destroy their respective marriages.

They have to decide how to manage a relationship that if taken further would destroy both their happy homes.

This is a fantastic classic movie that I never tire of watching both for the quality of the writing, acting and cinematography and because it shows two people desperately struggling between the pull of duty to their spouses and their desire for one another. I hope you enjoy it too.

Here’s the IMDB pages on the cast and crew. Watch out for some famous British actors and actresses like Alfie Bass and Irene Handl in early uncredited roles.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037558/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast

So here’s this weeks film Brief Encounter, and unless you have a heart of stone you will probably have a tear in your eye by the end.