(1946. b/w) "Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. There'll come a time in the future when I shan't mind about this anymore. But I can look back and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was. No, no, I don't want that time to come hither. I want to remember every minute, always, always to the end of my days."

On Thursdays at Milford Junction, where as usual Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), an ordinary ("sane and uncomplicated") English housewife, goes shopping for the week, gets a book at the library, and takes in a picture show, she makes acquaintance with Dr Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), a general practitioner from Chumley, after making his rounds at the hospital, who removes a cinder from her eye at the train station before each catches a train, she to Ketchworth, in opposite directions.

As they get to know each other on subsequent Thursdays - he's a self-described idealist, enthusiastic about preventive medicine (good hygiene and common sense) - spending afternoons in each other's company, lunching at Kardomah, going to the movies (the 1938 Flames of Passion is a fictional film), rowing a boat onto the lake at the botanical gardens, taking a car into the countryside, they fall in love. "We're neither of us free to love each other," protests Laura, concerned as well about self-respect and decency: "There's too much in the way."

Based on the stage drama by Noel Coward, who produced this exceptional film of a passionate yet discreet love affair, set prior to World War II, directed by David Lean, the events are revealed through Laura's never-to-be-spoken interior monologue, addressed to her husband.

Five weeks later, after romantic fantasies and lies that "outweigh happiness," including an evening in which both miss their train and go to Alec's friend Stephen's flat (after which Laura feels humiliated, defeated, ashamed), on their final rendezvous, seated somberly at a table in the refreshment room at the depot the illicit pair are interrupted by the gregarious Dolly Messiter (Everley Gregg), a gossipy busybody, before Alec is to depart for Johannesburg, South Africa, with his wife and children.

Back home in the living room with her unemotional husband (Cyril Raymond), listening to Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto on the gramophone (which comprises the entire soundtrack) while he does a crossword puzzle, she thinks to herself: "Fred, dear Fred. There's so much that I want to say to you. You're the only one in the world with enough wisdom and gentleness to understand. If only it was somebody else's story and not mine. As it is, you're the only one in the world that I can never tell. Never never. Because even if I waited until we were old, old people and told you then, you'd be bound to look back over the years and be hurt. And my dear, I don't want you to be hurt. You see, we're a happily married couple and let's never forget that. This is my home. You're my husband. And my children are upstairs in bed. I'm a happily married woman - or I was, rather, until a few weeks ago. This is my whole world, and it's enough, or rather, it was until a few weeks ago. But, oh, Fred, I've been so foolish. I've fallen in love."

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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