9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Timeless tale, beautifully told, June 26, 2009
This review is from: The Passionate Friends [VHS] (VHS Tape)
The emotions that drive the characters in this story are timeless. Rarely is a love story told so satisfyingly. The acting is controlled yet believable, with Ann Todd as the wife, Claude Raines as the wealthy husband, and Trevor Howard as the wife's "friend." Ann Todd's beautiful, intelligent face reflects emotions that she tries to control. Claude Raines hides his feelings under a calculating manner. Trevor Howard is understated and irresistably romantic, as he was in another excellent film, Brief Encounter of 1945. This movie has engaging characters, beautiful photography, and good music. It's a classic created with restraint and elegance.
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22 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
aka One Womans Story, October 13, 2001
This review is from: The Passionate Friends [VHS] (VHS Tape)
This Rank/Cineguild production directed by David Lean is based on a novel by H G Wells, here adapted by Lean and Stanley Haynes, though with a screenplay credited to Eric Ambler. Although the plot is about a triangle, Lean's focus is on Ann Todd as the woman between two men, her husband and the man who was her first love but whom she refused to marry. Her situation is presented in an exchange between the man, Trevor Howard and Todd - "If two people really love each other they want to be together. They want to belong to each other", Todd - "I want to belong to myself", "Then your life will be a failure". However in the tradition of upper class Brits, Todd's life of failure means a marriage to a successful banker, Claude Rains.
The narrative has an unusual triple flashback structure, which is perhaps why it needed three writers, with the present being narrated by Todd with the prospect of a divorce, and flashbacks to the vacation in Switzerland where the instigating incident occurs, Todd's memory/flashback of 9 years earlier re-meeting Howard, and small memories of their first romance. The initial meeting is tainted by lines like Todd's "Why can't we be in love without the clutching and gripping", though later Todd admits to "not being a very good person". Howard's character has his ambiguities too, being a university biology lecturer who knowingly has an affair with a married woman. The infidelity gets a funny spin by Rains' business with Germany and Italy pre-WW2, and Rains saying he has "a taste for intrigue", though the film being made post-WW2 allows him to speak of the "Teutonic hysteria" of the Germans.
In spite of some of Lean's technical touches, the thing that de-passionates the situation is Todd, in her first film for her then husband. Whilst at times she resembles Garbo, the rather butch Todd lacks the divine one's expressiveness, with Lean reduced to filming her running from Howard in slow motion to give her some lyricism. All three of the leads are oddly lit indelicately, perhaps to suggest that all this passage of time has aged them, but this with Todd, adds to the destruction of romantic intent. Lean provides a vocal montage of telephone conversations, cuts from a kiss to a bunch of flowers, doors slamming to a typewriter slide of the divorce document, gives Rains a cuckold paranoid montage, and has a "Keep Smiling" poster featured in the background of the climactic scene in the train underground, though the idea of Todd not buying a ticket before she enters rather pre-empts things.
Rains has the audience empathy, even if the odd way he stand in a ¾ pose when he confronts someone seems silly. He is the more emotional of the three, but because of the British standards of polite behaviour, his yells are either heard off-camera or with his back to us. The best scene reads as Hitchcock-influenced with Rains dictating to his secretary and Lean continually cutting to a pair of tickets to a play Todd and Howard go to see. The title First Love gets a comic payoff when we hear it is a musical with a fatuous title song.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A truly engaging film, July 5, 2011
I only wish it were available at Amazon on DVD---I happened to see it on one of the cable movie channels today and immediately wanted it but guess I'll have to wait on availability---Ann Todd is, I believe, such an underrated actress---she gave such a fine performance here, as well as in The Paradine Case and especially also in Madeleine---the story line in this movie has elements of another Trevor Howard masterpiece, Brief Encounter (particularly the use made of trains relative to the female lead), tho the timeline in Encounter was measured in weeks while in Friends we view a love affair over a number of years---the romantic (limited as it may have been) pairing of Ann Todd with Claude Rains was an interesting May-December combination which found greater importance in putting the Todd character in best perspective---bittersweet romantic elements mixed with intrigue and set in glamorous locations all made for an absolutely satisfying two hours---and take note of the delight in Ann Todd's observations as she sets out on holiday in the very beginning: airborne, she revels in the abundance of white bread, butter, creme and fresh fruit served to her, all things generally unavailable to Britons even then (1946) and certainly during the war years
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