Claude Rains will be TCM's star in Summer Under the Stars coming up in a few hours, and his day concludes with a movie I didn't know about until the last time it ran on TCM a few months back: The Passionate Friends. That airing comes up overnight tonight, or early tomorrow morning depending upon your point of view, at 4:00 AM.
Rains may technically be the star here, at least the male star, as the real leading character is played by Ann Todd. She plays Mary Justin, and as the movie opens it's some years after World War II and she's on her way to a well-deserved vacation at a resort on a lake in the Alps. (The Alps scenes were filmed in France, although the plot synopses have the action taking place in Switzerland.) While lying in bed at the resort waiting for her husband, she hears a voice that sounds very familiar, and she has a flashback....
At the start of 1939, Mary is married to Howard Justin (that's Claude Rains), who does some sort of banker's work which is soon going to take him to Germany and Italy to assess the situation in those two countries with the possibility of war on the horizon. But at a New Year's party, Mary runs into Steven Stratton (Trevor Howard), a science professor. It turns out that they had known each other in the past, before Mary married Howard, and that the relationship ended in a breakup that wasn't really a breakup, something shown in another flashback.
But in 1939 with Howard away on the Continent, Mary and Steven are able to see each other again and resume their relationship, at least until Howard returns. Howard is no dummy, and figures out that something is up, and when Mary and Steven return ostensibly from the theater, Howard knows this is a lie, and forces Mary and Steven to break up their relationship again. He's not going to grant Mary a divorce.
So as we go back to the present day, we learn that it's Steven who's wound up on vacation at the same resort as Mary, who is in a day or two going to be joined by Howard. Mary and Steven haven't seen each other for years, since Mary and Howard spent the war on government business in Washington. And it's just by pure dumb coincidence that the two wound up at the same hotel together. Still, not having met each other in years, they decide to spend the day on an excursion to one of those alpine peaks you can get to by cable car. They're safe, since Howard isn't supposed to show up until tomorrow.
Except, of course, that Howard is able to get an earlier plane, which enables him to get to the resort as Mary and Justin are coming back across the lake by water taxi. If Mary had been with any random stranger, it might not have been a big deal, but it's Steven, again, which really ticks off Howard.
I, and a lot of other viewers, couldn't help but think of Brief Encounter as I was watching The Passionate Friends, as both movies were directed by David Lean. I think I've mentioned before that I'm not the biggest fan of Brief Encounter mostly because I had difficulty sympathizing with the Celia Johnson character. By the same token, I found it hard to feel for Ann Todd's character. But worse is that The Passionate Friends feels like it has an even more muddled plot than Brief Encounter. The leads here all do fine acting jobs, but they're betrayed by that story structure.
Still, The Passionate Friends has that very British quality of seeming like a prestige film on a lower budget than what Hollywood would have done with the material. That, and the fact that I always think you should judge for yourself, are things that make The Passionate Friends worth watching and drawing your own conclusions.
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