AN INSPECTOR CALLS
(London Films-Watergate) HOUGH J.B. Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls has _become well known in this country, especially since a BBC radio adaptation was broadcast a few years ago, I had always missed it till it turned up in this film version directed by Guy Hamilton. I must say that I found it an absorbing piece of work, and now that I have read the play as well I can add that it’s a very fair translation of the original. The story concerns the aftermath of a dinner party at the home of an English industrialist. named Birling. The occasion is the engagement of his daughter to a young man whose family is a bit above the Birlings. Others present include Mrs. Birling and a slightly drunken son. Birling is smugly prophesying a coming knighthood when _ Inspector Poole arrives with news that a young woman has died from poisoning. For the rest of the play he is busy finding the points at which the girl crossed the path of members of the dinner party, who all in one way or another let her down. At the end there’s a brief airing for one of Mr. Priestley’s. metaphysical ideas, which in the film is given an additional theatrical twist. The whole action of the play takes place in the Birlings’ dining room in the one evening, and the dead girl, Eva Smith, is never seen. The film makes her one of the most important members of the cast, bringing the play’s conversation about her vividly to life in some of the most effective flashbacks I've seen for a long time. Mr. Hamilton showed in The Intruder that he could get away with extravagant use of this much-criti-cised device, and here he has refined his technique. The best of his ventures into the past are quite brilliant and cut most skilfully into the rest of the film. The one catch is that now we must believe that the Inspector was speaking all the time of the same girl, while Mr. Priestley, I imagine, meant us to understand that it was the responsibility of each participant to behave like a human being even if his encounter were not part of a cumulative individual tragedy. An Inspector Calls has an exceptionally good and balanced cast. Many of
the players will be new to most of us, and among these none is better than Jane Wenham, who gives a fresh and touching performance as Eva Smith. There will be argument about the fitness of Alastair Sim for the part of the Inspector, but he seems to me to do a very good job. He isn’t quite the Poole (it was Goole, anyway) of the play, but he is for all that a very effective Inspector whose occasional grim smile is not out of place. I don't quite know why Mr. Priestley set his play in 1912. Of course, he could really "go to town" on social distinctions in a story set so long ago, for no doubt we have come some distance since then. But if social distinctions aren’t what they were, the smug and unimaginative are still with us-which is something we might overlook if we think of An Inspector Calls as a period piece. It isn’t really that at all.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19541217.2.41.1.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 804, 17 December 1954, Page 21
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549AN INSPECTOR CALLS New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 804, 17 December 1954, Page 21
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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