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Paul Henreid in ‘Casablanca’: Freedom Fighter on screen, Blacklisted ‘Subversive’ off screen Turner Classic Movies’ Star of the Month of July 2013, Paul Henreid, bids you farewell this evening. TCM left the most popular, if not exactly the best, for last: Casablanca, Michael Curtiz’s 1943 Best Picture Oscar-winning drama, is showing at 7 p.m. Pt tonight. (Photo: Paul Henreid sings "La Marseillaise" in Casablanca.) One of the best-remembered movies of the studio era, Casablanca — not set in a Spanish or Mexican White House — features Paul Henreid as Czechoslovakian underground leader Victor Laszlo, Ingrid Bergman’s husband but not her True Love. That’s Humphrey Bogart, owner of a cafe in the titular Moroccan city. Henreid’s anti-Nazi hero is generally considered one of least interesting elements in Casablanca, but Alt Film Guide contributor Dan Schneider thinks otherwise. In any case, Victor Laszlo feels like a character made to order for Paul Henreid,...

Brief Encounter (1945) Direction: David Lean Cast: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey, Cyril Raymond Screenplay: David Lean, Ronald Neame, Anthony Havelock-Allan; from Noel Coward's play Still Life Oscar Movies Highly Recommended Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Brief Encounter Synopsis: A married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a housewife (Celia Johnson) have an adulterous (and platonic) affair. The Pros: Shadow-bathed, smoke-enshrouded railway stations (cinematography by Robert Krasker) to the strains of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2. Enough to turn the jadedest among us into a wide-eyed romantic. David Lean's delicate, compassionate direction; and Lean, Ronald Neame, and Anthony Havelock-Allan's sensitive adaptation of Noel Coward's play Still Life. No Hollywood ending here, and no syrupy, cutesy moments, either. Just as important, neither the director nor the screenwriters are ever either judgmental or condescending toward their characters. Best Actress Oscar nominee and New York Film Critics winner Celia Johnson's...

From the Observer, 25 November 1945

Noël Coward's Brief Encounter (New Gallery) is, to my mind, not only the most mature work Mr Coward has yet prepared for the cinema, but one of the most emotionally honest and deeply satisfactory films that have ever been made in this country. I doubt very much if it will be generally popular. It represents a confidence so utterly frank that few people will be simple enough to accept it as true.

It is the story of a middle-aged married man and a middle-aged woman who meet by accident, fall deeply in love, and agree to separate and get over it. Their rendezvous is a station refreshment room in a North-Country market town. He is a doctor, who comes in every Thursday to take over a morning's duty at the local hospital. She is a housewife, who comes in to change her library book, go...

David Lean, 1945

In how many other countries would a poll pick Brief Encounter as the best movie romance of all time? Even in Britain, I wonder how many people born since, say, 1975 would rate it so highly. But for a generation that remembers when the trains ran on time and station buffets were as tidy and inviting as the one in this movie, Brief Encounter is etched in nostalgia for an era when trapped middle-class lives contemplated adultery but set the disturbing thought aside. On the face of it, it would seem that Britain has changed; but is it possible that the David Lean-Noël Coward film is still the model for repressed feelings as an English ideal? We are accustomed to attributing films to directors, but it's only proper to regard Coward as an equal author of this movie. He wrote the script, taking it from his own one-act play,...

David Lean, 1945

In how many other countries would a poll pick Brief Encounter as the best movie romance of all time? Even in Britain, I wonder how many people born since, say, 1975 would rate it so highly. But for a generation that remembers when the trains ran on time and station buffets were as tidy and inviting as the one in this movie, Brief Encounter is etched in nostalgia for an era when trapped middle-class lives contemplated adultery but set the disturbing thought aside. On the face of it, it would seem that Britain has changed; but is it possible that the David Lean-Noël Coward film is still the model for repressed feelings as an English ideal? We are accustomed to attributing films to directors, but it's only proper to regard Coward as an equal author of this movie. He wrote the script, taking it from his own one-act play,...