The Passionate Friends

“Their affair took on a life of its own.”

Mary Justin (Ann Todd) is married to Howard (Claude Rains), a wealthy man older than she is, and she cannot stop wanting Steven Stratton (Trevor Howard), a professor she loved before the marriage and who now has a wife of his own. David Lean, working from the H. G. Wells novel, follows the triangle that forms as she keeps returning to Steven. She stays with both men, and the film watches what each choice takes from her.