After two forays into Dickens territory—Great Expectations and Oliver Twist—David Lean returned to the type of tortured romance he had explored in 1945’s Brief Encounter. The Passionate Friends, which follows a socialite (Ann Todd) torn between her banker husband (Claude Rains) and a former lover who returns to her life (Trevor Howard), has the emotional intensity of that earlier masterwork, as well as imagery on par with Lean’s consensus pinnacle achievement: Lawrence of Arabia. Much of the movie consists of a flashback within a flashback, during which Lean and cinematographer Guy Green blur the edges of the frame to give it a distant, dreamy quality. Meanwhile, a gorgeous section filmed in the lakes and mountains of the Chamonix and Haute-Savoie regions in France shows his knack for psychologically matching character and landscape. As Mary, the conflicted socialite, Todd is called upon to do a lot of work in lengthy close-ups. She’s not always up to the task, but when she hits—as during a camera push into her face in the back of a taxi cab, shortly after her lover has reappeared in her life—it’s electric.
(11/14/2024)
