The Noir Chronicles: Infidelity

BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945) (B+) - This war-era Brit drama slowly peels away an illicit love affair that develops between two married people who meet randomly at a train station cafeteria. Claustrophobic with shadows and heavy with heaving locomotives, this classic noir takes its time letting an innocent dalliance eat away at the participants.

Celia Johnson (evoking a G-rated Phoebe Waller-Bridge) stars as Laura, who is bored with her crossword-puzzle-addled husband, Fred (Cyril Raymond), and two children, and thus is vulnerable to the simple charms of Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard). Soon they are meeting every Thursday, going on chaste dates but undeniably falling in love. Director David Lean helped adapt the Noel Coward play, and this one succeeds through its looping flashback structure and its powerful dialogue expounded through the inner voice of Laura in the form of her explaining the story to Fred.

The sympathy for Laura's emotional struggle comes off as surprisingly modern, as she is unafraid to bare her soul and explain her dilemma in urgent words. Johnson and Howard have strong chemistry even if their affair is not particularly passionate. Coward has injected droll humor through the surrounding cast of characters, in particular the cheeky dalliance between a ticket taker and the woman who runs the cafeteria, echoing the cheating couple. It's all very English and quite moving.

THE LETTER (1940) (B) - Bette Davis smolders and slithers as a woman who guns down the man who, by the looks of it, spurned her and ended their affair, thus setting up an underhanded scheme to use her wealth to cheat the Singapore criminal justice system. She claims it was innocent self-defense, but a letter in her handwriting suggests otherwise. So she uses her husband's wealth and exploits the weakness of their lawyer to game the system and secure a quick acquittal.

This Somerset Maugham story, directed by William Wyler ("Roman Holiday," "Ben-Hur"), seeks to lay bare the sins of the monied class. But it oddly demonizes the natives, especially the widow of the victim, a classic dragon lady (Gale Sondergaard). James Stephenson plays a frustrated stuffed shirt as the lawyer. Herbert Marshall is the husband in denial.

Davis holds it together admirably, and she was shooting deadly side glances decades before Susanna Hoffs was even born. Wyler uses arch angles and mood lighting in an attempt to create dread; he half succeeds. The dialogue (Howard Koch ("Casablanca") did the adaptation) is clever and sharp at times. If only the narrative itself had a little more zip.

BONUS TRACK
"Brief Encounter" is imbued with the music of Rachmaninoff, and we couldn't help noticing the strains of Eric Carmen's "All by Myself" in the second movement of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor: