An Inspector Calls (1954)

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

People are voting emotionally.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

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.

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.

I can't, of course, prove it but the cynic in me says that Arthur Miller ripped off Priestley's An Inspector Calls, which was produced on stage in 1946, a full year before Miller's All My Sons. Not so much the plot - although even here there are similarities; Priestley set his play in the English Midlands in 1912, on the eve of the First World War and it revolved around a young woman who committed suicide after being used and abused by four members and one member-to-be of an affluent family, Miller set his play in the American mid-West in the wake of the Second World War and it revolves around the suicide of a young man who discovered that his father, a war profiteer, was responsible for the deaths of several pilots - as the theme that we are all responsible for each other. The play was revived by the Royal National Theatre in London about ten years ago and featured a spectacular 'theatrical' effect. Guy Hamilton's film version contents itself with introducing the Inspector dramatically and effecting his disappearance in much the same way; in between he relies on his cast. As the play is to a great extent actor-proof this is no bad thing although it is easy to see why Bryan Forbes abandoned acting for directing before the phone stopped ringing. It's also interesting to speculate why George Cole, who made his first film in 1941 and had appeared in some 25 by 1954, agreed to one uncredited scene as a bus conductor in one of the few 'opened out' scenes. Overall this remains a very watchable entry.

A wonderful adaptation of an already very good play that, in my mind, improves upon the original source material. As a morality tale it's fairly thought provoking - though it's slightly irritating that the female character has to spell things out for the audience every few minutes - but it probably works even better as a simple character drama.A good cast is headed by the always fantastic Alastair Sim as Inspector Poole (the name changed from the original text - in my opinion for the better, controversially), who, though on screen less often than you might think, is like a burning sun around which orbits everything else in the film. The cool, calm yet still devastating Inspector is a part Sim was born to play and I can't imagine another actor bettering it. The Inspector as presented here is more benign than that of the original play, which could have risked making the Inspector seem less interested in the other characters and too detached from them - the Inspector of the film never raises his voice, and some of his more forceful lines are given to the young female role - but Sim is able to maintain a chillingly capable and oppressive demeanour simply by smiling. He almost floats through the proceedings. A truly magnetic performance.The direction is also to be commended - there are several edits between shots designed to make you jump, and they definitely do the job - and enlivens the material when the film could have been a bit of a slog (though the script is great it's obviously far more difficult to maintain an electrifying atmosphere through film than through the more immediate medium of the theatrical stage). There's little I can say about "An Inspector Calls"; I'd just highly recommend it. Give it a go.