Director David Lean made his international reputation with this Noel Coward adaptation/collaboration that takes a sincere and direct angle on the frustrated love between a married, middle-aged suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) and a married, middle-aged doctor (Trevor Howard) whom she meets by chance in the waiting room of a railroad station. "Brief Encounter was a totally adult film, expressing an essential Englishness, for it would be hard to imagine French lovers behaving as this pair.... There was a despair and a purity about this pathetic little union and the acting of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson...was of a quality that totally expressed the futility and universal relevance of the situation. Brief Encounter, as a study of basic relationships of its time, stands out as a beacon throughout the whole of British cinema...." --George Perry, "The Great British Picture Show." "This encounter reveals the externally decorous, concealed, internal destruction, by all the guilts in the decency code, of instinct and nerve; of which just enough remained for hope and pain. The last, 'happy' scene thus becomes a nadir of abjectness.... 'Make tea, not love'" --Raymond Durgnat, "A Mirror for England"