Brief Encounter is a story about love being inescapable, about two people brought together by fate. You can call it ‘circumstance’ or ‘coincidence’, if you’re not a hopelessly old-fashioned romantic like me… But what’s the fun in making a film about it?

Filmed during the war, this love story comes from a time when falling in love wasn’t to be expected.

Much as in we begin at the end of the story.

In a railway station café, a man and woman are disrupted, mid-farewell, by a passing, busy-body aquaintance. It is only once we are taken- via flashback- into their story, as they unexpectedly fall in love, that we see the poignancy of that final meeting. Housewife Laura Jesson and doctor Alec Harvey met by chance but, although already married, they gradually fall in love with each other, meeting every Thursday in the small station café.

Their love is impossible but still beautiful to watch.

It’s perhaps an incredibly British thing but whilst the love is fantastical the characters are not glamourised. The lead, Celia Johnson was primarily a Stage actress, who appeared in merely a few films. She was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for the film, and I feel should have won.

Heavy make-up is employed to normalise a beautiful face, to make her older, ordinary and sympathetic. Adultery was taboo in 1945 and Brief Encounter was banned by the Irish censorship board on release, for sympathetically portraying an adulterer.

The film is based on a 1935 short one-act stage play “Still Life” by Noël Coward. The original play was merely five short scenes in a train station, whilst this version develops their encounters further, developing the burgeoning connection between Laura and Alec. It’s not all doom and gloom- there is one rather humorous moment where Alec near seduces her by loving whispering the names of lung diseases.

Brief Encounter is a beautiful, British film- quintessentially so. Laura evolves as a person, becoming more mature and at the same time more childish. She questions herself and doesn’t trust her own thoughts until she is secure in being loved. When Laura is distressed the lighting and staging are notably noiresque; her stunted passions blossom to drive the film.

Rather English; constantly putting oneself down. Much like having friends we dislike because it would be terribly ill-mannered to let them go…

Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is one of the bestselling books of all time, with at least 28 million copies having been published in nearly every language. Its immortality was however secured by David O. Selznick’s 1939 film adaptation- winner of 11 Academy Awards, including the first for a black actor, Hattie McDaniel… although her character isn’t exactly… progressive.

It is an epic, almost operatic, saga set throughout the civil war and tells the tale of kittenish Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara, a girl so pampered that even to put her face in the sun is considered too tiring. She is in love with the self-consciously chivalrous gentleman Ashley Wilkes and near destroys the lives of those around her for his love when really she is more in love with the idea of being in love with him. And even that is with the ideal version of him.

Theirs is a relationship born of hate but really rooted in love. No matter how much they argue and throw things, they will never be able to escape from being each other’s perfect match.

MGM took a risk in casting Vivien Leigh as Scarlett- this was one of the most talked about and coveted roles in Hollywood to date and they chose an English nobody with the wrong colour eyes?! Handily changed in post-production.

The risk paid off however; the to-be-honest, slightly tepid tale of thwarted love amid the ashes of the old South leaps from the page to become one of the greatest love stories of all time because Leigh’s lively brilliance makes Scarlett believable!

Clark Gable unforgettably incarnates Rhett, but this film would be nothing without Scarlett.

Which is in no way saying that it is perfect: it’s disturbingly lenient to the Confederacy and does a sterling line in “happy slaves”. This film was released into cinemas at a time when there were still people living who had memories of the American slave trade and plantations. It is very recent history. Yet, grotesquely, the black characters are shown as being clearly better off under slavery and the war does nothing to help them.

Let’s also not forget the film’s insistence that a gentleman may feel free to assert his conjugal rights.

However, whether you are watching on a cinema screen, television screen or indeed, your laptop, the huge exteriors and skylines ablaze have a dreamlike, expressionist quality that radiates. Gone With The Wind was one of the first films to be made in splendid, expensive Technicolor. Granted, at times, even those beautiful skylines can seem a little formulaic but… not only is the film fabulous for it’s modern heroine and refusal to give a neat conclusion, it also does not shy away from amassing as many clichés as it possibly can. After all, you’ll like at least one of them, right?

Paths of Glory is arguably the best film about the First World War, and certainly one of Stanley Kubrick’s finest. It is a treatise on human injustice; a compelling and harsh indictment of war. The title is entirely ironic and comes from a line in eighteenth century romantic poet Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

This brilliant criticism of the macabre futility and horror in the trenches was adapted by Kubrick, Calder Willingham and pulp expert Jim Thompson, from the 1935 (Nineteen Thirty Five) novel by Herbert Cobb- which, scandalously, was inspired by a real event.

The scarred and brilliant George Macready plays French General Mireau, an officer who in 1916 (Nineteen Sisteen) orders a suicidally fruitless attack on a German stronghold. After the inevitable debacle, he orders three men to be chosen at random and shot for cowardice.

“The men died wonderfully!” he vainly crows as he enjoys tea and delicate pastries at Head Quarters. Utterly disregarding that they died in droves, failed to secure the objective and semi came under fire from their own artillery.

No, no, they died wonderfully.

In the trenches- amid the mud, the rats and the corpses of one’s friends- there is at least a sense of solidarity amongst the honourable yet ill fated soldiers. Their emotions are real.

Yet, in the General’s HQ, amongst the columns, frescos and sweeping staircases, the expensive art on the walls and marble floors underfoot, the aristocrats and officer class converse in ghoulish obscenities about acceptable death tolls. The Versailles-like structure sapping their moral thoughts, until they are strangled by protocol, precedents and military codes.

Away from the banal social etiquette, Kirk Douglas plays rough old soldier Colonel Dax, revolted with his superiors’ arrogant ineptitude. He attempts to defend the innocent men who are to be slaughtered. Kubrick’s juxtaposition of nauseating trifling tyranny behind the lines and battle scenes strewn with camaraderie is masterful.

And what battle scenes! The relentless right-to-left tracking shots through a no man’s land strewn with corpses and wire and the explosions that hurl showers of muddy debris on the actors- and the camera- were state of the art at the time.

Kubrick was just 28 when he directed Paths of Glory and I cannot stress enough just how magnificent the battle scenes are!

In the final sequence, a scene of enigmatic redemptive beauty, a German woman sings to the troops as Kubrick blends compassion, perhaps with something of those commanding officers’ detachment and control.

“Gentlemen of the court,” says Douglas’ Colonel Dax, in a line that could plausibly appear in a subsequent Kubrick film, “there are times when I’m ashamed to be a member of the human race, and this is one of them.”

Paths of Glory’s anti-war message and cinematic reprisal meant it suffered poor box-office returns, and was banned in France and Switzerland for almost twenty years following its release. Knowing that, to me, makes the film’s social message even more cutting.