JB Priestley’s drawing-room melodrama of Edwardian guilt and fear is rereleased for its 70th anniversary; it is an intricate clockwork mechanism ticking inexorably to the final reveal, with beautiful monochrome cinematography and thoroughbred character-actor faces looming out of the screen like a bad dream. It was adapted by Desmond Davis from Priestley’s stage play, directed by Guy Hamilton and unforgettably stars Alastair Sim as the implacable Inspector Poole, with his cool professional insolence, a needling, insinuating manner and sonorously droll voice; it is a performance to put alongside Sim’s Scrooge and his Professor Potter in School for Scoundrels.
It is 1912, and the inspector arrives unexpectedly at the sumptuous home of well-to-do magistrate and captain of industry Arthur Birling (Arthur Young), who is hosting a dinner party to celebrate his daughter Sheila (Eileen Moore) getting engaged to a local well-born chap, Gerald Croft (Brian Worth). Birling preens himself insufferably on this new social connection and his own forthcoming knighthood, and his wife Sybil (Olga Lindo) is resplendent in respectability, presiding over a charitable organisation of patrician ladies doling out small sums for the deserving poor. Meanwhile, her son Eric (played by the future titan of British film, Bryan Forbes) is a highly strung wastrel, worrying his mother and sister with his drinking. George Cole – famously mentored in the business by Sim himself – has a small role as a tram conductor; he and Moore were to be married, having met on this film.
With a half smile of amused contempt for the transparent evasions and absurdities of everyone he interrogates, the inspector tells them that a certain young working-class woman has taken her own life by drinking disinfectant; with ruthless calm, showing her photograph to each of the characters in turn, he elicits their own guilty association with her. Every single person has something to hide, and something therefore to admit – their own part in the group-guilt of arrogance, hypocrisy and heartlessness, perhaps especially the puce-faced Birling himself, who begins the drama by blustering that of course there will be no war (although that was perhaps more of an upper-class attitude of the 1930s rather than 1912).
The woman herself is Eva Smith (Jane Wenham), once a factory girl in Birling’s works, who was progressively destroyed by everyone there, reduced to wretchedness by their general cruelty, snobbery and moral cowardice. What has to be borne in mind is that in 1912, as in 1954 when this film was made, suicide was a criminal offence; survivors, incredibly, could be prosecuted. For those who did not survive, acquaintances and associates of the dead person might be tainted with some complicity and a police inspector was indeed entitled to ask questions and spread fear.
And so the inspector confronts everyone with their own behaviour and their own smugness, he lays bare their caste selfishness and conceit. (Priestley’s stage comedy When We Are Married from 1934, filmed in 1943, does very much the same sort of thing, though on a lighter note.) The drawing-room spectacle is interspersed with an elegant pattern of flashbacks showing us everyone’s awful history with Eva in five well-crafted mini-backstory dramas; An Inspector Calls almost looks like a very closely knit portmanteau picture.
Of course, it’s possible to argue that in showing the younger generation as the morally astute figures present, Priestley effectively goes a little bit easier on these people than he thinks, but what emerges very strongly is that Eva infuriates her elders and betters with outspokenness; she speaks up courageously for herself and they find it intolerable, which creates an unbearable new layer of irony when Eva refuses to name the young man who has got her pregnant. At 80 tightly wound minutes, it is a brilliantly constructed piece of work.