JohnHowardReid
Despite its stellar cast, "An Inspector Calls" (1954) is not even a moderate success but a somewhat lack-luster affair on the cinema screen. All told, it is not half as effective as it is on the stage where its obvious theatricality rates as a plus, rather than a minus factor. When the film was first released much was made of the fact that Sim had a dramatic rather than a comic role, but he seems rather uncomfortable in the part nonetheless. He obviously knows that despite all the publicity to the contrary, his faithful audience will be hanging on his words, waiting for him to say something funny - and will be very disappointed when this doesn't happen. It's left to Arthur Young as the bloated business-man and Jane Wenham as the victim to make most of the runs. Dull, static direction by the usually competent Guy Hamilton doesn't help either. In fact, given its splendid advertising and its cruise liner publicity, "An Inspector Calls" rated as a big disappointment with both the professional critics and regular moviegoers at the time of its release way back in 1954.
James Hitchcock
"An Inspector Calls" is a socialist parable thinly disguised as a detective thriller. One evening in 1912, Arthur Birling, a wealthy industrialist and former Lord Mayor of a large provincial city, is hosting a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of his daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, the son of another upper class family from the same city. The party is interrupted by the arrival of a police Inspector who states that he is investigating the death of a girl named Eva Smith who once worked in Birling's factory. None of the family is suspected of murder; the death was clearly suicide. Under the Inspector's questioning, however, it is revealed that each member of the family was in some way linked to her death in that it was their mistreatment of Eva which helped driver her to kill herself.Arthur dismissed Eva from his employment for asking for higher wages. Sheila, who had taken a dislike to her, engineered her dismissal from another job as a shop assistant. Gerald kept Eva for a time as his mistress and she was also for a time the lover of Arthur's son Eric, who got her pregnant. When, in desperation, Eva appealed for assistance to a local charity, she was turned down by a committee chaired by Arthur's wife Sybil.The film is of course based upon the well-known play by J.B. Priestley. Whenever stage plays are adapted for the screen it is common practice to alter the playwright's original text by what has become known as "opening up", using a much greater variety of locations than would be practicable in the theatre and showing us characters and events which are referred to but never seen on stage. In the fifties, not all films were "opened up" for the screen, but this was done with "An Inspector Calls". Although in other plays, such as "Time and the Conways", Priestley enjoyed playing tricks with time, in this one he observes the Classical Unities of place, time and action, the whole action taking place in the Birlings' dining-room over the course of a single evening. Eva Smith is often referred to, but never seen. In the screen version, however, we see the whole of Eva's story and her relationships with the various members of the family, told in a series of flashbacks.There are, however, occasions when "opening up" might with greater accuracy be called "closing down", and this film is an example of what I mean. In both play and film the Inspector (known as Inspector Poole here, Inspector Goole in the play) is a mysterious figure. Priestley leaves it deliberately ambiguous as to whether he is a genuine police Inspector, an impostor, a symbolic personification of justice or conscience or a supernatural figure. (The name "Goole", pronounced "ghoul", may hint at this last possibility).Something else left ambiguous is whether "Eva Smith" is one person or several. It would, after all, be a remarkable coincidence if every member of the family, quite unknown to one another, had had dealings with the same woman. In the play the possibility is left open that Goole may have misled the family into believing that they had all known the same person, whereas there may be as many as four women involved- the real Eva Smith who was sacked from Birling's factory, the unnamed shop girl, Gerald's mistress who goes by the name Daisy Renton and Eric's lover, also unnamed, who later asks the charity for help. This is an interpretation which has been favoured by some commentators on the play; Priestley's main purpose was not to construct an Agatha Christie style "whodunit" but to emphasise the various ways, both economic and sexual, in which the upper classes took advantage of those whom they saw as their social inferiors. In the film, however, where Eva actually appears and is played by one actress, Jane Wenham, this interpretation is effectively "closed down", and in my view this rather detracts from the richness and complexity of Priestley's play.Despite this, "An Inspector Calls" is a pretty good film. On the acting side, Wenham was rather too genteel for the working-class Eva and I felt that Eileen Moore was perhaps too attractive as Sheila; it is suggested that Sheila was partially motivated by jealousy of Eva's looks, and the stunning Eileen does not look like a girl who would need to be jealous of anyone. With those exceptions, however, all the actors are very good, and Alastair Sim as Poole is something more than good. The play was also filmed for British television in 1982 with Bernard Hepton as Goole. In that production, Hepton played the Inspector as a rather harsh, abrasive character, perhaps more in line with the way Priestley described him. Here Sim makes him much more smooth, persuasive and insinuating- yet makes us believe that this is just as valid an interpretation of the role.Despite Priestley's left-wing views, he was regarded with some suspicion by the "Angry Young Men" of the fifties, who saw plays like "An Inspector Calls" as the sort of drawing-room drama they were reacting against. The "Angries" preferred to depict working-class life via the medium of social-realist drama rather than discuss working-class problems from the perspective of middle-class metaphor. this may have influenced the decision to show Eva in the film; the only working-class character in the play is the maid, who plays a minor role. Ironically Priestley was to remain a socialist throughout his long life, unlike some of the "Angries" such as John Osborne, who were to move sharply to the right, and although not all of his work is well-remembered today, "An Inspector Calls" has been rediscovered as a classic of the British theatre, particularly since Stephen Daldry's famous 1992 production. This film helps show us how it was interpreted by an earlier generation. 8/10
Spondonman
The day Alistair Sim died in 1976 this was the film UK BBC1 showed in tribute, and it was the first time I'd seen it. Over the years this particular effort has seemed to me to gain in stature, it's power and poignancy increasing as we maybe realise all the more that some lessons are never learnt, and that the wheel of life is oiled by life's mistakes. Sim made some unforgettable appearances in films throughout the '40's and '50's - also being unforgettable in The Ladykillers even though he turned it down.In 1912 an enigmatic police inspector named Poole calls on a well-to-do family with information that a girl they've all been involved with has been found dead. And more, much more. It's Green For Danger Meets Last Holiday Meets Dead Of Night, with a nod to Ophuls in part thanks to Chagrin's music. The cast are wonderful, Sim at his eccentric best with his black humour sometimes bordering on grisly. Only one skeleton was in this family closet though... Priestley's play was transferred to the big screen perfectly – you seldom remember it was a play it's so classily photographed showing the cast being inspected. As in Priestley's later story Last Holiday which was filmed earlier (and which also had music by Chagrin and Sim's Ladykillers substitute) the co-incidences pile up, are in turn believed, disbelieved, and eventually boggled over, by the cast and us.Wonderful and engrossing moral entertainment! Is it impossible to make thoughtful little gems like this, like this anymore? If remade all its polish and erudition would be more or less thrown to the winds: the cast would be cursing and coarse with graphic sex and violence to keep the viewer amused. A point would be made but the point would be lost.
