BRIEF ECSTASY - 1937 - PAUL LUKAS - RARE DVD

Brief Ecstasy (1937) is a remarkable film, and the stand-out title of the set. A melodrama with expressionist touches, it has strong echoes of its near namesake, Brief Encounter (1945), but there is a bit of Rebecca in there too with a sinister housekeeper threatening the young wife of an older man. You can find the jealous obsession of Othello as well in a tale of a young woman (played by the beautiful – and beautifully lit – Linden Travers), who misses out on marrying a man she meets in a tearoom, then weds the professor for whom she works, only to have the first lover turn up five years later.

The film is full of imaginative visual flourishes (the cinematographer is Ronald Neame), using mirrors and montage sequences, but its great strength was highlighted by Graham Greene when he was writing regular film criticism: ‘The subject is sexual passion, a rarer subject than you might think on the screen and the treatment is adult: there isn’t, thank God, any love in it.’ For a film from the 1930s, it still carries a noticeable erotic charge.