The Passionate Friends is the film most deserving recovery -- an intricate triangle story.
--David Thomson
David Lean was once appreciated for his early well-crafted and personal British films, now mostly forgotten after his bloated and impersonal epics: Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965). The Passionate Friends is a very personal film from H.G. Wells's 1913 novel, a more intricate and complex version of the superb Brief Encounter (1946), starring Trevor Howard, Claude Rains and Ann Todd, containing flashbacks within flashbacks. Todd is in love with struggling student Howard but leaves him in a burst of independence --"I don't want to belong to anyone" -- for the wealthy and older Claude Rains. But she keeps running into Howard everywhere and is discovered with him in Switzerland, where they accidentally meet, when Rains arrives earlier than expected. Howard is happily married to someone else but Todd has fantasies of them being together, as she vacillates between intimacy and independence.
The theme of infidelity was an important one to Lean, who was rather a womanizer and was married six times, including a marriage to Ann Todd after their affair during the making of the The Passionate Friends (he was married to Kay Walsh at the time). Lean started as an editor on silent films and worked his way up to director, with the help and encouragement of Noel Coward. He was particularly skilled at working with screenwriters and cinematographers to get the results he wanted, working with Eric Ambler as writer and Guy Green as cinematographer on The Passionate Friends, which has, yes, passion and emotion often missing from his later films.
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