A Brief Detour to Carnforth . . .

Hope everyone had a lovely Easter weekend.  Here in the UK, we had glorious, sunny weather.  I travelled up to Lancaster for two days to meet up with some knitting friends.  I really like Lancaster - it's a small, completely walkable city with a lot of history, beautiful architecture and lots of independent shops and cafes, including two yarn shops!  Both Northern Yarn, which has a wonderful selection of British yarns as well as wool from local Lancashire farms, and Ethel & Em, which stocks a lot of Rowan yarns as well as some fun chunky cotton yarns perfect for crocheting baskets, are delightful places to visit and just kitty corner from each other.

The next time I visit the city, I really need to take some photos and do a proper post, but being with friends and doing a lot of chatting and knitting, I didn't take out my phone as often as I usually do.  However, on the Saturday, as three of the knitters headed off to London, I travelled one stop with them on the train and got off at this iconic station.

Yes, Brief Encounter is probably my favourite movie of all time and parts of it were shot at this station. There's a little museum with a tiny cinema where the film is constantly running.

You can also see various memorabilia, such as a copy of the script.

There's was also a room with a tribute to David Lean films and plenty of history about the station and historical steam trains.

And of course the famous refreshment room where so much of the film is shot.  In reality, it was a film set, but possibly based on the real one in Carnforth.

The Banbury buns have been replaced by lemon drizzle cake and there was no sugar in the spoon that accompanied my latte.  No Rachmaninoff playing in the background either.   But I think it was still worth the pilgrimage.

I've always loved travelling by train and I think there's something especially poignant and even sexy about films set either on trains or in stations. They are such public, noisy spaces and yet can be strangely intimate at the same time; one can run the gamut of every emotion available depending on why you are there, who you are with, where you are going and why.  A number of years ago on another blog, I wrote a post listing my top ten train films. I've just revisited it, and I think the list still stands.  Here it is if you are up for some celluloid train spotting:

1. Brief Encounter (1945).  My favourite movie of all time. Has any train station ever tried piping Rachmaninoff over its speakers? Or would that only work if they could also clone Trevor Howard? That firm, farewell touch on the shoulder gets me every time. My favourite scene is the one where Celia Johnson is travelling back to her mundane home,  looking out of carriage window into the dark night and fantasising about how different her life could be with Howard.

2. Before Sunrise (1995).  Because that's the ultimate fantasy isn't it?  You meet your French soul mate on a train and spontaneously decide to spend the next twelve hours traipsing around Vienna getting to know each other.  If I was doing a list of my top ten walking movies, the sequel - Before Sunset - would definitely be on it. 

3. Caught on a Train (1980).  This TV movie was originally made by the BBC and it stars one of my favourite actors - Michael Kitchen. He plays an impatient man on his way across Europe to attend a book fair in Linz, and finds to his horror that he's seated for the duration of the trip in the same carriage as the indomitable Peggy Ashcroft. One of the pitfalls of travelling is not being able to choose your companions, but it's also sometimes one of the best things about travelling too. The acting in this is superb. 

4. Tokyo Story (1953).   The great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu used trains in many of his films to express the emotional as well as physical distances between his characters. In Tokyo Story there's a very poignant scene where a woman is travelling home after her mother-in-law's funeral and she takes out a pocket watch that was given to her. It says everything about time's own sad journey. In an interview I watched with one of Ozu's camera assistants, he said the director always shot his train scenes in an actual train - no studio could  ever re-create the actual bumps and jostles of the real thing. 

5. Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Was there ever a finer set of actors stuck together on a train going nowhere and with Hercule Poirot to deal with?

6. Strangers on a Train (1951)  Hitchcock was another director who liked to set scenes on trains. This is a terrific thriller. 

7. Closely Watched Trains (1966). Based on the novel by  Bohumil Hrabal, this film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.  Set during WWII in occupied Czechoslovakia, it's about a young teenager who is more concerned with losing his virginity than resisting the Germans. You'll never look at stamps the same way again (the ones you ink, not the ones you lick).

8. Terminal Station (1953). This movie is also sometimes known as Indiscretion of an American Wife but if you get a hold of the Criterion edition, you'll find both movies on it.  Watch Terminal Station, directed by Vittorio De Sica first, and then for a laugh, see what happened to the movie when David O. Selznick got his hands on it. The plots remain the same, but the execution, style and focus are very, very different. In both cases, Jennifer Jones (married to Selznick at the time) and Montgomery Clift spend the entire movie trying to say goodbye to each other in Rome's train station after a summer affair. Watch it for De Sica's beautiful shots of the station's architecture, the numerous human stories swirling around the lovers, and for a reminder of how difficult it is to find a private place to have sex in a crowded train station. 

9. 2046 (2004) Our main character is a writer living in Hong Kong in the late 1960s. He has written a science fiction story set far in the future, where people live in train compartments, served by androids. These trains criss cross the world, and if you dare, you can visit 2046, a place where lost memories might be found. But can you ever return?  This is the sequel to Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood For Love but it works completely well as a stand-alone. Gorgeously filmed and with an awesome soundtrack. 

10. Love on the Run (1979). This is the final film in François Truffault's Antoine Doinel series that began with The 400 Blows. Antoine is trying to sort out his love life, both past and present. At a train station he sees a woman he was in love with as a young man, and impulsively boards her train. She happens to be reading a copy of his novel which thinly disguises his former relationship with her. It's funny. It's farcical. It's French. And I laugh every time. 

Do you have any favourites?