Kay Walsh. David Lean approached Clemence Dane to write the script, but considered what she wrote "so awful [-] It was hideously embarrassing" – that he decided he and Ronald Neame should write their own versions. In January 1945 they went to the Ferry Boat Inn at Fowey in Cornwall and wrote a continuity. When Lean worked on Brief Encounter Neame worked on the script with Havelock-Allan, and later with Cecil McGivern. Kay Walsh was another writer given a screen credit and wrote the ending. Production notes Alec Guinness admired the way Lean directed him, singling out a close-up in which he had to laugh out loud, and which he struggled to make look un-manufactured. Lean told him to forget about the whole thing, sat by his side, and made a little signal to the camera to start turning in the course of the conversation. He said something which made Guinness laugh and then said, "Cut". Guinness: "So he got this shot on a totally false premise... but thank God. I don't think I would have ever achieved it otherwise". Valerie Hobson however called the experience of working with Lean on the film "the unhappiest" and called him "a cold director – he gave me nothing at all as an actress". At the end of the film, a shot of Valerie Hobson staring into a mirror was taking longer than anticipated and was suspended – it was lunchtime – and returned to in the afternoon. Later, some three months after the film had been on exhibition, a cinema-goer asked what was meant by a Chad being reflected in the mirror. It seems that a worker on the film had drawn it on the wall during the break in filming, and it is dimly visible in the final scene behind John Mills' shoulder as he says "I've never ceased to love you when there seemed no hope in my love". The musical score is credited to Walter Goehr, known primarily as a conductor, but significant portions were actually written by Kenneth Pakeman. Reception Critical The film won critical praise on first release, with many commentators hailing it as the finest film yet made from a Dickens novel. Dilys Powell, writing for The Sunday Times, was "grateful for cinema which includes so much of Dickens, which constructs its narrative from the original material with scarcely an intrusion" and Richard Winnington, in the