HALF-WAY HOUSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 287, 22 December 1944, Page 24

HALF-WAY HOUSE

HIS British picture deals also with the world of the spirit. Or more correctly, it deals with the spirit world, for its two main characters

have been dead for a year and the setting of the story is a ghostly inn in a Welsh valley which was _ destroyed, along with the licensee and his daughter, by enemy action 12 months before. It deals also with spirits in a more tangible form, these being consumed in large quantities by Tom Walls and several other characters who put up for a day at the supernatural hostelry. Not that the ghosts themselves are completely intangible or disembodied either. Though they throw no shadows on the grass and cast no reflections in mirrors, they dispense substantial hospitality, they work in the garden and at the sink, and one of them even bestows a platonic kiss on Esmond Knight in the course of the story. As an experiment with time and metaphysics, Half-Way House owes rather less to Dunne than to Vicki Baum, who in Grand Hotel first popularised the device of bringing together a group of assorted characters on licensed premises and letting them work out their destinies. The difference here is that, though the characters are assorted enough, their destinies are already worked out for them. They consist of a cashiered officer just out of gaol (Guy Middleton), a genial black-marketeer (Alfred Drayton), a morose, drink-sod-den sea-captain (Tom Walls) and his spiritualism-obsessed French wife (Francoise Rosay), a married couple on the verge of divorce (Richard Bird and Valerie White), and their — distracted small daughter (Sally Anne Howes), a famous conductor sick unto death (Esmond Knight), and a patriotic Wren and her sweetheart, a young diplomat from Eire (Phillipa Hiatt and Pat McGrath). All these people have not been under the same roof very long before they begin to notice certain curious details: for instance, that the calendars, the (continued on next page)

-_$_$_=_=_{_=_$_$_ — -------KX----~~7~_e_-_-_-(continued from previous page) newspapers, and the BBC news broadcasts are all exactly a year out of date. It then becomes plain to them, as well as to the audience, that the Lord is moving in a mysterious way, and that the inn has been temporarily rebuilt and its ghostly hosts have returned to earth for one day for the express purpose of helping the British war effort, This desirable end is achieved when the Black Market operator decides to go straight, when the ex-gaolbird decides to rejoin the Army, the naval man gives.up drink and decides to return to the sea, and his wife gives up spiritualism, the conductor makes up his mind to go on conducting concerts for patriotic purposes even though he knows it will kill him, and the son of Eire renounces his neutral status and an appointment to the Irish Embassy in Berlin and uses most undiplomatic language about the Nazis. And so on. Even a Welsh revivalist meeting could not achieve such a wholesale change of heart as takes place in this. Welsh valley. The acting, like the directon, is patchy. Tom Walls is not happy dis- guised behind a beard and a whisky bottle; the great French actress Francoise Rosay is absurdly wasted on an obvious attempt to repeat her role as the grief-distracted mother in Un Carnet du Bal; and Alfred Drayton’s portrayal, particularly in his opening scene, is much too near burlesque to be in keeping with such a fundamentally serious theme. On the other hand, Mervyn Johns and his daughter Glynis Johns do enter, almost literally, into the spirit of the thing. They are the ghostly Welsh innkeeper and his daughter, and thefr kinship in

real life probably helped them to give a "curiously intimate and remarkably. convincing quality to their performances in the film. As Lejeune pointed out in the Observer (and her opinion is exactly mine), Half-Way House is appropriately named, because it is "half way to a good idea, half way to good film treatment, and half way to good acting." With such a flying start; it is a pity that the film could not make the distance. Still, even half a good film is better than none, and a lot better than any number of wholly bad ones. So our little man is prepared to applaud Half-Way House, as much for what it tried to be as for what it is.