We have already looked at Lean as a contemporary of Hitchcock and Reed, but of course he was more. It is usual for admirers to make a critical leap from the post-war success of Brief Encounter and the Dickens’ diptych (Great Expectations and Oliver Twist (1948)) to the big-budget location shoots produced by Sam Spiegel, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia, both of which set up Lean as a global figure in the film industry. Within that period, however, and bridging the gap, are three neglected films in which the English stage and film actress Ann Todd, who became Lean's third wife, is the central female protagonist, if not the focal point of each narrative. The Passionate Friends (1948) and Madeleine (1949) were box-office flops; The Sound Barrier (1952) successful in the main as a novel action picture about the jet technologies of post-war aviation. Yet Todd's films with Lean in which her thin lips, fair hair, pinched cheeks and cool demeanour had earned her the unlikely tag of the ‘English Garbo’ have an unsettling aura in those five brief years before she dropped out of sight after her marriage to the director folded. Before we tackle his two great epics that book-end the start of the 1960s, Cinemascope followed by 70 mm Panavision, let us consider what preceded them and why. Let us look for the signs of a troubled romantic, that is, before he engaged with the end of Empire.