Die große Leidenschaft

I was surprised to learn that the original story for The Passionate Friends was written by H.G. Wells. Someone nowadays we identify with the science fiction genre. Certainly it seems to be what has survived best in English literature.

The original story was written in 1913 so some considerable updating was done to make it 1949 contemporary. Lovers Ann Todd and Trevor Howard had an affair back in the day which was ended when Todd's husband Claude Rains found out.

Eleven years go by and Todd and Howard meet at a mountain ski resort in Switzerland. Howard's now married and moved on, but they spend an innocent afternoon reminiscing. Rains catches them and misinterprets with near tragic results.

Ann Todd may be one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen. She's probably best known in America for being Gregory Peck's loyal wife in The Paradine Case. No wonder Rains is so jealous.

Trevor Howard is essentially doing the same part for David Lean that first got him stardom in Brief Encounter. In fact the story could almost be what happens to the protagonists in Brief Encounter if they met up again in the future. Claude Rains is always right on the money with his portrayals. There's a lot of what John Barrymore did in Maytime in what Rains does here.

If it were done here in the USA, this would have been labeled a woman's picture. It is in fact a nicely done romantic story.

The Passionate Friends is the first of three films that director David Lean made with Ann Todd in and she gives a fine performance in this mannered British melodrama that evokes in ways two other popular British films of the era, Lean's Brief Encounter and the Todd starring The Seventh Veil.

Former lovers Mary Justin (Todd) and Steven Stratton (Trevor Howard) meet accidentally at a New year's party and rekindle lost feelings. Trouble is she is married to a wealthy banker Howard Justin (Claude Rains) and Stratton's in a committed relationship. Justin discovers the affair however and puts an end to it. Nine years pass and they meet again while vacationing. Stratton is now married with kids but Howard thinks otherwise and files for divorce. Mary becomes desperate and suicidal.

With quality performances (especially Rains) from all of the leads The Passionate Friends is credible melodrama that overachieves with Lean displaying his superb grasp of film language, employing jump cuts, montage and juxtaposition for maximum effect. With a few Hitchcock like flourishes along the way he does an excellent job of keeping the audience guessing right up until the final minutes. It is this subtle triumph of form that makes The Passionate Friends a superior example of its genre.

Invariably this film is bound to be compared to "Brief Encounter" and I guess that's to be expected given they were both directed by David Lean, starred Trevor Howard and featured adultery. Frankly I think any comparison to be unfair because that's where their similarities end. I've seen both and I favor "Passionate Friends". I should add that Ann Todd is not one of my favorite performers. Her demeanor can be expressionless and somewhat off putting. But here she truly shines. In Lean's extensive close ups she reveals inner feelings without uttering a word. And her smiles are explosively radiant. She utterly owns this part. The male parts are equally excellent. All the performances wrap the viewer with their passion and involve him in the characters' fates. This is not light viewing. It's an emotional roller coaster and as the climactic finale unfolded I found myself talking to the screen trying to influence the outcome. Without a doubt this is a story by adults, for adults. Highly recommended.

For The Passionate Friends David Lean treads similar ground as he does in his masterpiece, Brief Encounter, although here the source material is an HG Wells story as opposed to a Noel Coward play.

The post-war Lean, with his attention to psychology and emotions, handled these stories of problematic romance brilliantly, and The Passionate Friends is a great example. We open with clouds and snow-capped mountains, a holiday location that foreshadows Lean's Summertime (1955), straight away giving us a sense of dreaminess and soaring emotions.

This is Lean at his most psychological and expressionist. The sound and imagery is always calculated to mirror feelings – like the abruptness of the plane wheel touching the ground when Claude Rains returns from his trip abroad. The acting really supports this too. Considering it's a story about a love triangle, a large amount of the story is told through scenes in which one of the three principal characters is alone, or at least unobserved, and the actors convey inner thoughts through subtle expressions and gestures.

Also, like the bulk of Lean's pictures from this era there are references to the war and the impact it had on British society. It's probably no coincidence that the decision was made to set the flashbacks of the affair in 1939 (Wells' original story was decades older), the year that war broke out. The cold, bureaucratic Claude Rains seems to be in part symbolic of the necessity in wartime to be rational and emotionless, and the story is an allegory for the need to break away from that.

While it is a good story and very well-made, The Passionate Friends is unfortunately no Brief Encounter. On the acting side, Claude Rains is brilliant as always, but I'm less convinced by Ann Todd, who perhaps got the part more because she was Mrs Lean that for her talent. The plot can be a bit confusing with its flashbacks within flashbacks. Probably the biggest problem though is that we never get to totally empathise with the characters. While Brief Encounter's sheer ordinariness made it so universal, you don't get this to the same degree here, and that makes it by far the weaker of the two pictures. Still, it's by no means a disaster, and still one of the better films of David Lean's 1940s output.

The Passionate Friends (1949)

You wonder how this movie would be told without the Hays Code (and its British counterpart) hovering over the scriptwriter and director. But here we have David Lean's version of the much older H.G. Wells novel (from just before WWI) with all the restraint of movie romances of the period. That is, without our modern idea of passion.

And that's one of the things that makes this really work. It's not about making love on the sly, or going rapturous on screen. It's about the complicated emotional needs and conflicts of three people. That's what passion boils down to, at least in a way that we want to spend time with. And though this is not a full fledged love triangle like "Jules and Jim" (it's one woman caught between two men), it does play with the clashing and melding of three personalities and their passions.

Oddly, you learn fairly soon that the passion of the older man, played by Claude Rains, is deliberately not passionate. That's not what he wants in love. The younger man (not by much) is played by Trevor Howard and he is a sweetheart, with a family, and yet he still has that pure ideal love for the woman he can't shake. Even though she is married to the older man.

The woman holds it all together, both in the story, since she is involved with both men, and in the movie, played with amazing force and nuance by Ann Todd. When she first appeared on screen, thinking to herself on a plane taking off, I thought she was a little like Joan Fontaine, and since I love Fontaine, I was going to be open to this inferior version. But she wasn't inferior one bit. The longer the movie went on, the more I realized what a deeply felt, complex performance Todd gives. She not only has to be a different kind of woman with each of the men, she has to do so in different time periods over about eight years. Great stuff. I want to watch it again just to appreciate her. She was almost wholly a British actress, not moving to Hollywood, and so she never had an American audience the way some of the more famous stars here naturally did. Too bad for everyone.

The movie, as such, has a little inevitability to it--not that we know how it will end, exactly, but that we know how it will probably end, the one or two main options. The rivalry, the jealousy, the caught looks across a train station, the views from the Italian Villa, all the clichés are here. They are all perfectly handled, for sure, but an edge of originality would have helped a lot. I'm very curious to read the Wells book just to see how complex he makes the woman, and the story. And to check the ending he had in mind in 1913.

Lean, the director, is a legend of course. He made so many really fine films, important ones, it's easy to overlook this one. Even the slightly similar (in feel) "Brief Encounter" from 1945 casts a huge shadow here. Throw in "Lawrence of Arabia," "Dr. Zhivago," "Blithe Spirit," "Bridge over the River…." You get the idea.

See this. Expect nothing sensational, and you'll be sucked into a really superb, conventional, beautiful romantic drama. I just read (and gave a thumbs up) to a long review for this film that seems incredibly perceptive, but which maybe forces too much analysis onto the motives of the players here--especially for someone who hasn't seen it yet. I suggest getting sucked in and taking the advice to be patient, but also forging your own view of the events and hearts involved.