For The Passionate Friends David Lean treads similar ground as he does in his masterpiece, Brief Encounter, although here the source material is an HG Wells story as opposed to a Noel Coward play.

The post-war Lean, with his attention to psychology and emotions, handled these stories of problematic romance brilliantly, and The Passionate Friends is a great example. We open with clouds and snow-capped mountains, a holiday location that foreshadows Lean's Summertime (1955), straight away giving us a sense of dreaminess and soaring emotions.

This is Lean at his most psychological and expressionist. The sound and imagery is always calculated to mirror feelings – like the abruptness of the plane wheel touching the ground when Claude Rains returns from his trip abroad. The acting really supports this too. Considering it's a story about a love triangle, a large amount of the story is told through scenes in which one of the three principal characters is alone, or at least unobserved, and the actors convey inner thoughts through subtle expressions and gestures.

Also, like the bulk of Lean's pictures from this era there are references to the war and the impact it had on British society. It's probably no coincidence that the decision was made to set the flashbacks of the affair in 1939 (Wells' original story was decades older), the year that war broke out. The cold, bureaucratic Claude Rains seems to be in part symbolic of the necessity in wartime to be rational and emotionless, and the story is an allegory for the need to break away from that.

While it is a good story and very well-made, The Passionate Friends is unfortunately no Brief Encounter. On the acting side, Claude Rains is brilliant as always, but I'm less convinced by Ann Todd, who perhaps got the part more because she was Mrs Lean that for her talent. The plot can be a bit confusing with its flashbacks within flashbacks. Probably the biggest problem though is that we never get to totally empathise with the characters. While Brief Encounter's sheer ordinariness made it so universal, you don't get this to the same degree here, and that makes it by far the weaker of the two pictures. Still, it's by no means a disaster, and still one of the better films of David Lean's 1940s output.

It's easy to associate "The Passionate Friends" to its detriment with "Brief Encounter"; in its voice-over/flashback structure, in its themes of suicide and adultery, and of course in the casting of Trevor Howard. But in a sense -- although not, unfortunately, an entirely successful one -- in a sense, the later film is an attempt to do something very different with this source material. At the most basic level the two pictures have virtually nothing in common: "Brief Encounter" is a story of renunciation and unselfishness, of ordinary lives in an unromantic setting, of heartbreak from a painfully honest narrator. "The Passionate Friends" (a title never really explained) revolves ultimately around selfishness and self-deception, lavish trappings and a shallow surface gloss epitomised by the cheesy 'Swiss' tourist music that backs the initial establishing shots.

Mary's swelling soft-focus memories of her grand passion are deflated by jarring little jabs from the director, in what I suspect is intended as an alert to the viewer that her romantic-seeming situation is not quite what it seems -- in effect, she is an unreliable narrator, and the pay-off comes when she perceives, finally and appallingly, what she really is and what she has done. It is a climax worth waiting for, but it is slow to arrive; and the subtle wrongness in the love affair, the self-dramatisation and lack of authenticity (whether or not these are deliberate attempts to undermine her presentation of events, as hindsight suggests they may be) until then tend to come across simply as unconvincing story-telling.

It is never clear just what Mary means by her assertion that she wants to belong to herself and not to any lover. By the end, however, it is all too apparent that this mantra, reminiscent of the "Can't tie me down, babe" slogans of the (male) serial shaggers of the Sixties, is every bit as self-indulgent a female pose. She is in love with the idea of being in love: playing at it, day-dreaming transgressions. But when reality strikes, the whole game is exposed as a silly, hugely destructive fantasy.

After the first showdown with her husband (which we are specifically, and with hindsight, significantly, not allowed to witness), she warns Steven that she is not truly a good person to love. We -- and he -- do not then either understand or believe her; but she is right. She is not prepared to give herself, in modern parlance to 'commit': but she will not let go either.

The trouble for me is that for most of its running length the film seems to be simply a somewhat off-kilter account of an adulterous affair, over-ponderous, with clumsy use of music and heavily ironic dialogue. (The cinema audience, young and out for a good time, spent rather more time giggling than I assume the director intended.) The cinematic tricks that are present, such as the abrupt cuts in the taxi scene, the nested flashback structure, or the montage of advertisements in the Tube station reading "Keep Smiling", "Strength" and "Saved", too often seem awkward or labouring the obvious. If the idea was indeed to subtly undermine audience preconceptions, it doesn't really work -- there is no equivalent here to the stunning shift in perception that exists between the opening sequence of "Brief Encounter" and the final unwinding of the flashback.

As the ambiguous Mary, Ann Todd is a strangely elusive presence. The character is at the heart of the plot and has the lion's share of screen time, and yet most of that time it's hard to get a grip on her beyond the superficial. I'm still not sure whether this is an intended result of the acting and/or direction, or a flaw in the film.

Trevor Howard carries off the role of the unfortunate Steven with angular charm and provides the requisite sense of bewildered decency; but as others have rightly remarked, it is Claude Rains, in what might appear a largely peripheral role, who steals the show. Rich, older, physically unprepossessing, and mildly affectionate towards his wife when he can spare a moment from the financial markets, Howard Justin is the face of moneyed security versus the romantic passion promised by Mary's once-and-future lover, and as such represents the trappings of a marriage of convenience rather than an actual human being. But almost from the beginning we are made aware that he is neither unintelligent nor unobservant; later we discover that he is not as complaisant as the other couple have assumed, and finally, that he can be hurt -- and can love -- as deeply as any other man. Over a mere handful of scenes in the course of the film Claude Rains manages to convey more tension and real emotional presence than anyone else, and it is this contribution that makes the final twist both plausible and satisfying.

"The Passionate Friends" is not the great film that I feel it is perhaps trying to be; but it is certainly not an abortive carbon-copy of "Brief Encounter". The resolution of the film is starkly effective and is worth sitting through a glossy and rather uninspired beginning for: as a whole, it can be seen as an honourable failure.

(Edit: for what it's worth, in the month since I saw this film I haven't been able to get it out of my head...)

I think that most people will admit that Claude Rains was one of those character actors who transcended their lack of handsome features (or likable features) to be a real movie star - even though most of their roles were types involved in the plot for better or ill. He is in that select group with Basil Rathbone, Charles Laughton, Sidney Greenstreet, Laird Cregar, Vincent Price, George Sanders, Boris Karloff who dominate films they pop up in even though they are not the hero. When they are the hero, when Rathbone is Holmes or Sanders Uncle Harry or Laughton is Sir Wilfred in WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION we are especially happy. Rains too occasionally played nice guys, although with an edge. In the late 1940s he twice appeared as a wronged husband, first in Mitchell Leisin's SONG OF SURRENDER (1946) and once in David Lean's THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS. SONG OF SURRENDER (with Wanda Hendrix and MacDonald Carey) is the weaker of the two films, but has some good touches by Leisin's direction and due to Rains' acting. THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS has a better, more brittle screenplay, and David Lean's direction complements Rains' performance.

Rains is the husband of Todd, who on a vacation meets Howard. In a sense this film is a kind of inverse version of BRIEF ENCOUNTER (which also was directed by Lean, and starred Howard), but that film concentrated on the sad, inevitably doomed love of the two middle aged people who cannot marry each other. Here we are seeing the triangle from the point of view of the husband - in the earlier film, Celia Johnson's husband was a cypher who only seemed to come alive at the tail end of the film. Rains is not immediately seen, but he is in the center of events from the start.

For Rains quickly learns of the affair. British people are supposed to be quiet about their private lives, and they don't like the snooping of others in hearing about their problems. So when he first appears to confront Howard and Todd it is in the flat he and Todd live in. He is polite but quietly outlines what he knows, and Howard at the tail end suggests that possibly he (Howard should leave). Very effectively we hear Rains marvelous speaking voice spitting out (one can imagine him shaking with anger) "GET OUT OF HERE!" The film follows the relations of the trio. Try as she does to avoid Howard, Todd keeps returning to him. Rains ignores the facts as much as possible, but finally when he is to meet Todd at a vacation hotel, he realizes that the behavior of everyone on the staff is proof that she has been seen there with Howard. There is again an explosion, and the marriage seems doomed.

I saw THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS only once in the early 1980s, and it amazed me for telling about a sexual triangle simply and with dignity - and for giving the husband (finally) equal time to present his case - for the highpoint is a speech near the end when the depth of the real emotions of Rains pours out - when his care for Todd is fully expressed. Rains had many great moments on screen, but in all honesty this was his most human moment. For that alone the film is worth remembering.