Here we are on Valentines Day we mark the end our search for the most romantic movie as 1945 British romance film Brief Encounter comes in at number one.Starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard the film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946 and Celia Johnson was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress.Though he might be best remembered for sweeping epics such as Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, renowned British director David Lean began his film career with small-scale character studies based on the plays of Noel Coward. Lean's fourth film, Brief Encounter, which was also his fourth and final collaboration with Coward, adapts the playwright's heartbreaking tale of two ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary power of love. Laura (Celia Johnson) is a seemingly happy, middle-class housewife who meets the equally married physician Alec (a young Trevor Howard in only his third screen role) when he removes a speck of dust from her eye at a London railway station. The pair soon find themselves drawn together through weekly meetings at the station cafe, their casual encounters blooming into a chaste love affair marked by intimate conversation, longing glances.

This is intertwined with the tragic realization that neither of them will be able to break the bonds of social propriety that keep them wedded to other people.

Seen by some as quintessentially English, Lean's achingly lovely exploration of the conflicting demands of personal happiness and social responsibility remains nonetheless universal and timeless.

As romantic movies go Brief Encounter breaks the tradition with a downbeat ending yet despite this David Lean has produced a simple, realistically honest and unsentimental movie that looks at forbidden love.

Unlike romance movies that are made today the emotions of the principle characters are kept under the surface until their final meeting, both choosing to protect their families from hurt rather than satisfy their own desires.

The setting of the train station makes the movie feel more intimate as David Lean produces one of the most heartbreaking romance movies of all time – they don’t make them like they used too.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw