We didn't want to think today - just wallow in great films. We happened on two in which trains are central. And what links all today's choices are incredible performances by their female leads - here Deborah Kerr, or Celia Johnson, as she's sometimes known.
I've kinda covered all this ground before, but there's a lot going on here. The soundtrack is marvellous. The way their trains are going in different directions is a great metaphor for their relationship. I think those flashback moments are done simply by killing the fill light and leaving the key light on the actor (well, Johnson) against a backdrop of blackness, but there's a more complicated dissolve when she appears bottom right in the sitting room but the rest of the frame is still the flashback scene - not sure how that was done.
And on thinking the scene with the friend's flat inspired Wilder and The Apartment, there's a scene after of Johnson running away along a street that you could cross-cut with Wilder's film and Shirley MacLaine doing exactly the same thing.
And as I've said a million times before, it's a very modern film, beginning at the end the way it does (Lean's idea). Also, the parallel relationships - there's certainly also something going on between conductor Stanley Holloway and tea shop proprietress Joyce Carey (even, in very slight sub-story, a romance between her assistant and a passing soldier).
It was Oscar nominated for Johnson, Lean as director and Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allen for screenplay; though interestingly it was not BAFTA nominated for a single thing*. Also won Grand Prize at Cannes. Noel Coward wrote the original idea as a thirty minute play called 'Still Life' set entirely in the waiting room.
J. Arthur Rank was one of the film distributors at the time who had no involvement in the creative side of the films he financed and thus it was a very successfully creative period of British film making, if you think of Powell & Pressburger, Lean, Carol Reed etc.
*Ed. That's because the first BAFTA Awards were not held until 1949.
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