David Lean directed Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Dr. Zhivago (1965) back-to-back, garnering 19 Oscars out of 34 nominations in those years. (By the current IMDB top 250, only the first two even appear on the list, with Dr. Zhivago apparently not reaching the heights of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy—all of which are on the list). These are widely considered three of his top five films. Top four, even.

And then there’s this little gem, Brief Encounter, sitting like Coppola’s The Conversation between masterpieces, easy to overlook when regarding the epics he is known for, and arguably his best film. (I’d be more likely to argue that for The Conversation than this film, granted.)

Clocking in at 86 minutes, it could also be Baby’s First Lean flick, assuming Baby is comfortable with conversations about adultery.

Expanded from a Noel Coward play (by Noel Coward, who gets top billing), this is the story of Laura (Celia Johnson, The Holly and the Ivy, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) and Alec (Trevor Howard, The Third Man, Mutiny on the Bounty—memo to self, I should do a back-to-back review of the 1935 and 1962 “Mutiny”s) who have a chance encounter in a train station in England toward the end of the war. Laura gets a bit of grit in her eye and Alec, a doctor, removes it. No big deal. Perfectly proper, eh, what?

Turns out that the two both spend Thursdays alone in Milford: Her, shopping. Him, doing rounds at a hospital.

They run into each other again, therefore. And this time Alec wants to have lunch next time they’re together.

We all know where this is going, of course. Even they do, as it becomes harder and harder to deny.

The movie is narrated by Laura, who is explaining it to her husband in her head, because he’s the only one who would understand. Of course, she would never tell  him. She begins the narration after the opening scene, which is the end of the movie (narratively). In the next 80 minutes, as we see what leads up to this opening scene, we get this sense of epic-ness as seen in Lean’s much longer films. We’re not the same at the beginning of the movie as at the end. We’ve been through a lot. And this scene, viewed a second time, in full context, feels completely different and much, much darker.

The acting is tremendous, of course. Coward was at the height of his powers, just coming off his smash-hit (banned by the BBC) “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly To The Germans“. His touch here is perfect. His treatment of Alec and Celia is sympathetic without pandering.

While there is tremendous photography going on (by Bob Krasker, who won an Oscar for The Third Man), it’s conventional, almost staid, until the climactic moment when he starts going Dutch, as it were. It’s just one unforgettable shot that supports the entire film and clues the audience to what’s going on, and it’s very Lean-ian in that it maximizes the cinematic quality of what’s going on. It’s not something that could be done in writing or in a play—it requires a moving picture camera to do it at all, and it requires a fine understanding of the medium to do it well.

The editing is tight, as mentioned, by frequent Lean collaborator Jack Harris (The Ladykillers, Billy Budd).

But what we take from this film—the thing we often lament is missing from modern movies—is its humanity. Because everyone is terribly human. Yes, we focus on Laura and Alec, but Myrtle runs the refreshment concession where they first chance to meet, and she’s got a thing going with Fred, who’s sort of train bobby (I’m Californian, I don’t know trains), and this has a surprising amount of depth and sensitivity for what might be mere “comic relief” in other films. And then there’s the busybody, the suspicious friends…the movie lives, in other words. It breathes and feels alive, which makes our characters all the more sympathetic.

I don’t want to hold this up as being representative of all dramas of the era—and certainly, it’s not “Kill Bill” (which appears on the top 250 twice, for both the first movie, and the whole edit)—but it seems like our best work today isn’t even the same species.

Trivia: The scene Alec’s buddy, who innocently lends him the apartment for his potential tryst with Laura, became the inspiration for Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Classic Wilder inspiration: “What about that guy?” I remember a Widler interview on “60 Minutes” where they asked him what movie he hadn’t made that he wanted to, and it was a Crusades story, where all the men in the village had run off to fight for the Holy Land, but before they left, they put all their women in chastity belts. Charlton Heston would play the town locksmith.