This is the original David Lean film based on the Noel Coward text Still Lifw with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. Johnson gives a quite remarkable performance as the suburban housewife plunged into a love-affair she never expected, and ending up born between feelings pleasure and intense guilt as a result.
The film is very much of its time, with soldiers coming into the station buffet and demanding whiskey, even though it is well past opening hours. They amuse thermselves by insulting Mrs. Baggot (Joyce Carey) who looks after the bear. Every emotion is kept under careful control: Mrs. Baggot affects an upper class accent, though it’s clear she is as common as nucjk. Daisy, her waitress companion, has a playful love affair with the station porter, but both are careful to restrict their dalliancing to after hours. Mrs. Baggot has a love-affair with station porter Stanley Holloway, but they are careful to restrict their activities to the occasional kiss or a smack on the bottom. In the moral scheme of things, they are allowed the odd moment of outrageous behaviour, as they are from the working class.
Not so Laura and Alec. They are firm members of the middle class, and are expected to remain respectable. We only know the effect Alec has on Laura through the tiniest facial gestures that would be imperceptible were it not for Ronald Nedame’s camera focusing on close-ups of her face (from Alec’s point of view) during their conversations.
The morality is straightforward. As a happily married women with.a devoted husband and two children, Laura has responsibilities, which she feels she neglects by falling in loved with Alec. This might be perfectly justified, but it’s clear that Fred, Laura’s husband (Cyril Raymond) doesn’t’ understand her at all, and treats her as a domestic convenience to bring up the children and keep the home going, with an afternoon per week to go out shopping and visit the pictures. He does not always understand that she is a passionate woman, dying for something or someone to lighten her life. In this film, we know what Laura will do, but doubt whether this is the best decision for her. When Alec departs for South Africa, the affair will of necessity come to an end, leaving her with memories of frustration and heartache. Maybe it takes a homosexual to understand these feelings more closely than his heterosexual contemporaries.
The contrast between Laura and Mrs. Baggot is evident. As a ‘mere’ bartender she is permitted the odd expression of love for true station porter, with perhaps the odd bit of slap and tickle. By contrast Laura has to bottle up her feelings, or let them out on her own in the street as she goes to the station. Coward stages at least two sequences where the lovers are interrupted: in one, Alec’s flatmate unexpectedly returns home. Laura manages to get out unseen, but the flatmate confesses that he is unimpressed with Alec’s behaviour. Maybe the two of them should have shared a joke. In the second interruption, Laura and Alec’s final conversation is interrupted.by Laura’s friend Dolly, who shows spectacular insensitivity by talking incessantly and not noticing the lovers’ desire for her to go. Dolly’s reaction sums up the general expectation: women such as Laura are not expected to have love-affairs, and hence their friends continue on their merry way as if nothing had happened.
The two lovers’ characters are finely distinguished. Despite his protestations of love for wife and family, Alec always wants more. He keeps telling Laura how much he loves her, and initiates the idea of spending some time alone at his flatmates. Maybe he is trying his luck a bit, especially since he does not appear to listen to Laura’s doubts. Undoubtedly attractive - especially to Laura - he claims that he will never forget her, even in South Africa, but we wonder whether this is a cliche designed to placate her. Laura, on the other hand, is far more cautious. She never comes out direct with the phrase “I love you” and although communicating her true feelings in the voiceover that spans the entire narrative (which communicates what she would like to say to Fred, but cannot summon up the courage to do so), she remains taciturn to Alec, even while embracing him. She accepts his advances, but makes little comment herself.
Seventy years on, we have to take the story as a period-piece, but still Johnson’s performance is astonishing, as she shares her agonies with us, and undergoes much the same emotions as we do if we happen to fall for someone not our wives. It proves the oft-told dictum that times might change, but people’s reactions don’t. This is s film about real people in real situations, situations that occur throughout time.
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