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Notebook

Thursday, 20th November 2008

The middle-class cinema-going public may have lapped up "Brief Encounter", but shortly before its official premiere in November 1945 its director, David Lean, had tried it out on a distinctly working-class audience in Rochester, where he was filimg "Great Exprectations". The cinema, as Lean soon discovered, was full of sailors from the nearby Chatham dockyards. "At the first love scene one woman down in the front started to laugh. I'll never forget it. At the second love scene it got worse. And then the audience caught on and waited for her to laugh and they all joined in and it ended in an absolute shambles. They were rolling in the aisles."
David Kynaston, “Austerity Britain, 1945-51”.

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