My first day of college didn't end until about 4 o'clock this morning, because TCM was showing for the first time one of David Lean's most obscure and forgotten movies: The Passionate Friends. Although my lethargy prevented me from getting 100% experience, I still enjoyed the film a good deal, enough to provide you with a review.
The best way to describe the film? You've seen Brief Encounter, right? (If you haven't, you'd better get on that, Mr. Wannabe Film Buff.) Well, start with Brief Encounter. Replace Ceilia Johnson with Ann Todd (Lean's then-wife and one of England's biggest movie stars). Shift the focus from Laura and Alec to Laura and her husband. Add Claude Rains, some fine location shooting (in the French Alps) and crowd scenes. Lather, rinse, repeat. Voila. After about 91 minutes, you have The Passionate Friends.
Based on a novel by H.G. Wells (?), The Passionate Friends is very much a David Lean film. It deals with Lean's usual themes of infidelity and its consequences on individual people. Lean is one of the most human of directors, in this writer's estimation; he doesn't shy away from depicting his protagonists as flawed human beings, and his refusal to glamorize adultery and romantic entanglements (in and of themselves) shows a degree of sophistication and maturity beyond most directors. The film treats our protagonists, Mary and Steven, as two lovers who missed an opportunity as young people - Mary refused Steven's proposal because she "didn't want to belong to anyone". Now, she realizes that she made a mistake, but by now she's comfortably married to a successful businessman, Howard Justin (Rains), who looks upon romantic love as something to be, if not feared, than avoided for its unpredictability. Mary is forced to make an impossible choice between two men she loves, albeit in different ways, and who each love her. This is a theme Lean often worked with, and would explore in more depth in Doctor Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter. The course of true love never did run smooth, least of all in a David Lean movie, where the choice isn't simply between the usual bad or at least unsatisfying husband and the dashing lover. Things just aren't that simple.
The cinematography (by Guy Green) is another remarkable aspect. Lean's later epics are of course astonishing visual spectacles, but his early films show a mastery of black-and-white cinematography with few peers in the annals of cinema. This has to be one of Lean's biggest films up to this point, making extensive use of beautiful Alpine scenery, showing that even this early in his career, Lean had an eye for the beautiful and picturesque. But he maintains the gorgeous use of expressionist lighting and angles which mark the best of his early work (Brief Encounter, Oliver Twist), keeping the focus entirely on the characters, and it's this aspect that impresses more than the pretty scenery and location work.
The film contains a trio of top-notch stars. Ann Todd was one of England's biggest stars of the time, and she gives a knock-out performance. She's more glamorous and perhaps less down-to-earth than Ceilia Johnson in Brief Encounter, but that comes with the territory of casting a star - and certainly she has the talent to pull her character off. Trevor Howard, on the other hand, pretty much sleepwalks through his role; his character is basically a retread of Alec Harvey (even being a medical professor), only with much less focus on him, which definitely has an adverse impact on his performance. However, the film is quite easily stolen by Claude Rains, as Todd's conflicted husband who isn't sure how to deal with the situation; Rains pulls off all of the character's emotions regarding the situation, making him believable as a tortured husband in a near-impossible situation. In fact, I might even be so bold as to say that this is Rains' best performance.
Although not one of Lean's best works, The Passionate Friends is still a highly entertaining film. I certainly recommend it for romance fans, and anyone who likes David Lean. It gets an 8/10 from me.
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