Frankly, my dear

I have a piece in the current issue of The Believer. I originally volunteered to write a piece about Sergio Leone but ended up sending something completely different. Ed Park said he liked it but he had a few questions, so I amplified by including my favourite anecdote about David Lean:

There’s a passage in Kevin Brownlow’s biography of David Lean that describes Trevor Howard’s response to a poignant scene in Brief Encounter, the Rachmaninoff-saturated classic of repressed British love: “They know jolly well this chap’s borrowed a flat, they know exactly why she’s coming back to him, why doesn’t he fuck her? All this talk about the wood being damp and that sort of stuff.”

Lean struggled to explain his vision.

Howard: “Oh God, you are a funny chap.”

Lean: “Funny chap or not, that’s the way we’re doing the scene. Now come on.”

This had no direct bearing on Ed's questions.