Report by Mr Mizuhiko Yamaguchi, for
the
Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper,Tokyo,
16 th February 1988
When I looked for Milford, the scene of the brief
encounter of Laura, a married woman, and Alec, a doctor, on a map of England, I found five
places with the same name. But, on investigation, none of these places turned out to be
the location of the film. In reality the Milford in the film is Carnforth, a town about
400km N.N.W. of London and about 10km north of the industrial city of Lancaster.
The location team sent by the director, David Lean, had
to search for a country station where main line and local trains passed but express trains
did not stop and there were no local trains at night, and finally, they settled on this
town which had a factory equipped for the maintenance of steam locomotives.
When I visited Carnforth after phoning from London,
with the town clerk, Mr Frank Dutton who came to welcome me, I found it just as in the
film. The cinema "Roxy" that Laura and Alec went into together was right in
front of the station. The front had been converted into a supermarket but the brick
building was just as it used to be. The little park where Laura was looked at suspiciously
by a policeman as she wandered through the town at night at the end of the play, was on
one side, and the station tea-room, though now used as an office, looked the same on the
outside. Even the remains of the station's name board "Milford" was still there.
Looking up I could see the great clock, that urged the two to part, still ticking away the
seconds. To my surprise, Mr Dutton was not alone to meet me. The assistant driver of the
slow train that Laura got into, Alfred Bergus, and the mayoress, Edna Jones, in official
dress with a gleaming medal, were there too.
"Since that film was made you are the third person
to come here for information, and you a Japanese!" said Mr Bergus. There was a
welcome from the whole town for the Japanese who had come such a distance.
In the film the two main characters are wearing
overcoats all the time but in fact the play was filmed in May 1945, fifteen days after the
defeat of the German army. The filming began after seven in the evening and continued
until dawn.
"At that time I was seventeen" said Mrs
Jones, the Mayoress, "My mother was old-fashioned and would not allow me to watch the
night filming or take part as an extra. It's a pity."
The assistant driver of the train "Stanya Class
4", Mr Bergus, was 21 at the time. "For taking part in the film I received the
great sum of �30.00 for two weeks. During the filming we had splendid 6 course meals and
had tea twice, a real extravagance at that time just after the war. The camera staff got
�40 a week, so there even had to be a warning not to squander money in front of the young
people. But the work was exacting. I had to start the train 150 times.
The former driver and the mayoress's talk became lively
as they looked back over 43 years
"Trevor Howard gave the impression of being rather
unapproachable but Celia Johnson was friendly and even came and spoke to us. Although she
wore hardly any make-up she was really beautiful. She was a real lady!"
"Thanks to my mother I didn't even have a chance
to get a glimpse of the two. When I was 18 and went to see the film I thought it rather
dull but when I saw it the other day I thought it was wonderful. It seemed like a
classic."
However a questionnaire in an English magazine a few
days ago showed that six out of ten married women are hungry for romance. If there had
been this kind of questionnaire in Laura's generation, what would the response have been?
Most of the play was filmed in a studio on the
outskirts of London and Carnforth's "historic" fortnight was compressed into
less than 10 minutes on the screen.
Fifteen years after the shooting of the film there was
another historic event in Carnforth. The age of the steam train came to an end.
Mr Dutton urged us to visit the railway Museum on the
site of the former factory. Only remodelling of the passenger coach was not yet complete.
It is recorded that the remodelling of the Orient Express took precedence.
"How is it that such a typically English film
attracts such interest from the Japanese?" I was asked during an interview by the
local broadcasting company on the platform.
As I turned to the microphone to answer, an express
train passed triumphantly through the station.
This article has been translated into English, and I have
copied it as faithfully as possible, including the spelling mistakes.
Some of the facts don't appear to be totally correct, this may be inaccuracies or
misunderstandings by the journalist, or it may be a little "journalistic
licence"
If anybody wants to re-translate it for themselves, I do
have a photocopy, of the original article, in Japanese.
Report by Mr Mizuhiko Yamaguchi, for the Yomiuri Shimbun
newspaper, Tokyo,16 th February 1988
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