The Critics' Corner - BRIEF ENCOUNTER

"A shining example of how good a film can be when all idea of making it smart, snappy or glamorous has been discarded from the start." - The Guardian.

"An outstanding example of good middle-class cinema turned by sheer professional craft into a masterpiece; even those bored by the theme must be riveted by the treatment, especially the use of a dismal railway station and its trains." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide (HarperPerennial).

"Both a pleasure to watch as a well-controlled piece of work, and deeply touching." - James Agee.

"A celebrated, craftsmanlike tearjerker, and incredibly neat. There's not a breath of air in it. Coward's material is implicitly condescending even while he's making the two heroic." - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (Henry Holt & Co.).

"Although Noel Coward is a man of the theatre, his script is cinematic and revived the use of the flashback. Brief Encounter's value lies above all in its documentary-like description of provincial, middle-class English life, using both sets and realistic details..." - Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films (University of California Press).

"The whole colour, the spring, the almost magical feeling of the discovery that someone's in love with you; that someone feels it's exciting to be with you; that is something so tenuous that it's hardly ever been put on the screen." -- C.A. Lejeune, The Listener

"Brief Encounter is so far removed from the ordinary run of screen romances that it speaks, as it were, in another cinematic language." -- The New York Herald Tribune

"This is a poet's film, harsh, cruel and lovely. There have been few better British films than Brief Encounter even at a time when our studios are taking their place in the vanguard of this great contemporary art." -- Monthly Film Bulletin

"…what is most exceptional about it is that it dares to allow its average characters to remain average…" -- The Saturday Review

"It is the visualization of a fantasy of many sexually repressed women...If ending is frustrating for viewers, it is equally frustrating for the two would-be lovers - if they'd been French rather than British, it all would have worked out fine." - Danny Peary, Guide For the Film Fanatic (Fireside).

"Nowadays I am rarely moved to tears in the cinema and during Brief Encounter I found my handkerchief a sodden ball without having noticed I was crying because I was too absorbed in what I was seeing." - E. Arnot Robertson, Daily Mail.

"Intense and unforgettable, underscored by perfect use of Rachmaninoff's "Second Piano Concerto." - Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide (Plume).

"Brief Encounter with its streams of tears and its amorously awkward couple - the least sensual and most sentimental film ever wept over. Some people even weep thinking about it - inexhaustible tears from English crocodiles." - Francois Truffaut, The Films in My Life (Touchstone).

Awards & Honors - THE QUIET MAN

Brief Encounter won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

The New York Film Critics Circle named Celia Johnson Best Actress of the year.

The New York Times placed the film sixth on its annual list of top ten films, while Time Magazine placed it fourth.

The film was one of many imports to receive multiple Oscar® nominations in the post-World War II years, after years of the Academy®'s ignoring international films. In fact, some studio heads grumbled at the sudden prominence of non-Hollywood films at the Oscars® and threatened to withdraw their financial backing from the Academy®. Brief Encounter was nominated for three awards: Best Actress (Celia Johnson), Best Director and Best Screenplay.

In 1999, members of the British Film Institute voted Brief Encounter the second best British film of all time, just behind another Trevor Howard film, The Third Man (1949).

Five years later, British film critics voted it the same place on their list of greatest British films. This time, however, it came in second to Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

Compiled by Frank Miller & Jeff Stafford