Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Guy Hamilton
Starring: Alastair Sim, Jane Wenham, Eileen Moore, Bryan Forbes, Brian Worth, Olga
Lindo
Three years after his signature role of Scrooge in 1951's
A Christmas Carol, Alastair Sim was afforded the chance to play a sort of
anti-Scrooge in director Guy Hamilton's screen adaptation of
JB Priestley's morality play An Inspector Calls. As the titular inspector, Sim plays a variation of the ghosts of Dickens'
tale as he gives various characters a glimpse at the consequences of their
unfeeling actions.
Set in 1912, the drama plays out in the home of the upper-class Birling
family. Gathered for a dinner party are patriarch Arthur (Arthur Young), his wife Sybil (Olga Lindo), their daughter Sheila (Eileen Moore) and son Eric (Bryan Forbes), and Sheila's fiancé Gerald (Brian Worth). After dinner they receive a visit from Inspector Poole (Sim), who brings
the grisly news that a young woman has passed away after seemingly poisoning
herself.
The Birlings express sympathy but are initially dumbfounded as to why the
inspector believes they have anything to do with the matter. But then, one
by one, Poole jogs their memories and it seems they all had various run-ins
with the deceased. Portrayed by Jane Wenham in flashbacks, we see how
the woman (known as either Eva Smith or Daisy Renton) entered the lives of
all four of the Birlings and Gerald, and how she may have been left scarred
by the experiences.
Hamilton and writer Desmond Davis make some major and minor
adjustments to Priestley's play. In their hands it becomes something of a
proto-Twilight Zone with Poole portrayed as a sort of
supernatural presence who seems to have a gift for premonition. The big
change of course is the flashback structure, which opens up the play from
its drawing room confines and fleshes out the character of Eva/Daisy. In
doing so, however, it disrupts the ambiguity of whether Eva/Daisy is
actually the same person in all five encounters or rather a cipher for a
variety of young working class women who have been mistreated by this lot.
Poole shows each of his five "suspects" a photograph of Eva/Daisy, but he
ensures that they each see the picture in isolation. In the play this leads
to the question of whether or not the inspector showed them pictures of five
different women, but in Hamilton's film this touch is made redundant by the
casting of Wenham.
While it may cloud the ambiguous nature of the story, Wenham's addition is
also the film's greatest asset. The actress is thoroughly sympathetic as the
victim of the Birlings' various misdeeds, but she plays Eva/Daisy with a
tough exterior, as though determined not to allow herself become a victim.
At times her treatment is difficult to watch, none more so than when she's
forced to beg a charitable committee run by Sybil Birling for financial
help. Sybil belittles her, suggesting that her troubles are all of her own
making. Most of the film is rather blandly staged but Hamilton cleverly uses
framing and space here to imply the class gap between Eva/Daisy and Sybil,
with the latter looking down from a raised platform on the former.
As a morality play, An Inspector Calls is often guilty of
getting a little too overtly preachy in its message, but there's an
undeniable thrill in seeing a bunch of toffs held accountable for their
actions. With Sim's Poole seeming to take great pleasure from his
interrogation of his "suspects," who in turn get increasingly offended at
his line of questioning, An Inspector Calls plays like a
precursor to TV's Columbo. That show was a favourite of Soviet state TV for its theme of a working
man outwitting a wealthy foe each week, and
An Inspector Calls is similarly left-wing in its class
conflict, so much so that Priestley's play actually premiered in the Soviet
Union in 1945.
An Inspector Calls is released on
4K UHD, bluray, DVD and VOD by Studiocanal on October 7th.