Brief Encounter - The Lowry, Salford

Brief Encounter was voted the twelfth best British Film by Time Out magazine in 2017. The 1945 romantic drama shows Laura, a wife and mother, have a chance encounter with a handsome stranger on a railway station that she falls in love with. The film starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard started life as the play Still Life by Noel Coward. The Times critiqued it as “a serious and sympathetic study of humdrum people suddenly trapped in love”. Ten years later, Noel Coward's play was brought to life on the big screen by David Lean. It became one of cinemas masterpieces, nominated for three Oscars and for a number of years it was voted one of the best films ever made. Released just after the end of WWII, it showed the British stiff upper lip in all its glory. Focusing on the day to day drudgery people went through, shopping, returning library books and taking some solace in a trip to the cinema; it also showed underneath the façade that a generation of people who had sur