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The Passionate Friends

 

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)

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