"The angles, story, humor, dialogue, music, eloquence, Trevor Howard, Valli, Cotten. Smart fun."

"I’ve seen this picture a zillion times but always find something new to wonder about. Graham Greene, Carol Reed, Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Nazis, gangsters, Hitchcockian surrealism, innovative cinematography, a moody babe, Vienna, a zither for ear candy: it’s all here."

"“It all started on an ordinary day, in the most ordinary place in the world.”—Brief Encounter David Lean’s depictions of two ordinary women (Celia Johnson’s Laura and Katharine Hepburn’s Jane) restraining their desires for Trevor Howard and Rosanno Brazzi, respectively, are two of my all-time favorite cinematic portrayals of forbidden heterosexual love. Incidentally, both use the writing of gay playwrights as source material: Brief Encounter is based on Noël Coward’s Still Life, and Summertime adapts Arthur Laurents’s The Time of the Cuckoo."

"It all started on an ordinary day, in the most ordinary place in the world.”—Brief Encounter David Lean’s depictions of two ordinary women (Celia Johnson’s Laura and Katharine Hepburn’s Jane) restraining their desires for Trevor Howard and Rosanno Brazzi, respectively, are two of my all-time favorite cinematic portrayals of forbidden heterosexual love. Incidentally, both use the writing of gay playwrights as source material: Brief Encounter is based on Noël Coward’s Still Life, and Summertime adapts Arthur Laurents’s The Time of the Cuckoo."

"In her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, Rebecca West records the reaction of a Czech audience who, during a screening of Brief Encounter, “asked themselves with some emotion whether it could really be true that in England there were no other places than railway buffets where lovers could meet.” Maybe there weren’t, which is why the refreshment room at Milford Junction boils with passion, why Celia Johnson has a voice—and face—like cracked china, and why, when Trevor Howard utters the simple word good-bye, it is as soaked with tragic resignation as a biscuit in tea."

"“In what ca-TEG-ory would you put Mr. James Joyce?” Or, for that matter, this film? Among other things, I’d call it the best gangster picture ever made. Orson Welles got the most mileage from it (including a radio spin-off that recast the swinish Harry Lime as a good-natured rogue), a renown I find difficult to fathom, given the superb ensemble work by Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, Alida Valli, Bernard Lee, Wilfred Hyde-White, and a doctor who pronounces his name VINK-el. Carol Reed’s direction makes the most of every incident, and the whole package is tied up with one of the best musical scores ever."

"Maybe the best film ever made in Europe about modern Europe, by my favorite of all European directors, Carol Reed. It’s a companion piece to its follow-up, The Man Between, my other favorite Reed film; both films present a totally pessimistic take on the moral collapse of a divided postwar Europe, with no heroes or possible redemption. I’ve probably seen it fifty or sixty times since it first appeared on TV in the 1950s, and still watch it from beginning to end whenever I get the chance. With the exception of the miscast Orson Welles (how could Alida Valli ever have loved such a mean-spirited, charmless, smirking killer?), the players, led by Joseph Cotten, Valli, and Trevor Howard, are at their best, as are the finest collection of German-Austrian actors ever assembled. It contains one of the greatest musical scores and has easily the greatest ending to any film ever made."

"I knew and liked David Lean, a director of genius, who was very kind to me when he was making The Sound Barrier for my Uncle Alex, and Brief Encounter has always seemed to me the very best of classic British filmmaking, with its fiercely restrained emotions and good manners trumping passion, typical of its era. It is the best of the “small” British pictures, which my Uncle Alex tried to replace with “big” British pictures in an attempt to outdo Hollywood, rather than coexist with it, after he left it for Britain in 1932. Lean, who in Brief Encounter made this most English of English films (a distinction perhaps shared by This Happy Breed and The Fallen Idol, see below), moved onward and upward to ever bigger pictures, by way of The Sound Barrier, Summertime, and eventually the biggest and best of all epic films, Lawrence of Arabia, escaping from the confines of England to “international” films that challenged and beat those of the Hollywood studios. But Brief Encounter was a perfect, close-up view of a shabby, threadbare England, the England of “books from Boot’s, good drains, and class distinction,” in John Betjeman’s words, and of a muted, sad, doomed, and very English love affair. It has always been a film that puzzles the French, who find it hard to believe in a love story with almost no eroticism, and in which the lovers are usually dressed in raincoats. It is also Trevor Howard, a wonderful actor, at his best."