The Moral Core of ‘An Inspector Calls’

When J.B. Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls opened to excellent reviews at the New Theatre in 1946, the author’s feelings may well have extended beyond the triumph a playwright experiences at a successful opening. By all accounts it was a fine production, with Ralph Richardson at his best as the mysterious inspector who comes to question a complacent upper-middle-class family about their involvement in the suicide of a young woman. But during the war when Priestley had been giving the BBC’s Postscript affirming British values to counter the broadcasts from Berlin by the traitor William Joyce, the famous writer had been taken off the air because to some Conservative MPs his vision of the future was too socialist. Now with Labour in power Priestley had the satisfaction of knowing that every night his Inspector Goole was denouncing the evils of capitalism to the play’s West End audiences.

Still, An Inspector Calls is more than socialist ideology, although the play is quite explicitly a critique of class distinction. As the Inspector questions one member of the family after another about their involvement with the dead woman, known first as Eva Smith, it is revealed that each of them is in different ways responsible for her destruction. Arthur Birling the industrialist—“I gather there’s a very good chance of a knighthood if we don’t get into the police court or start a scandal”—has fired Eva because she was one of the leaders of a strike at his factory. Having changed her name to Daisy Renton, she had then been the mistress of Gerald Croft, the upper-class young man engaged to Birling’s daughter Sheila. In a fit of temper Sheila herself had got the girl fired from her job in a dress shop. The family’s arrogant matriarch Sybil, as head of a charitable committee, had refused the girl aid because she would not name the father of the child she was bearing. The father turns out to be Eric Birling, the alcoholic younger son.

My first encounter with An Inspector Calls on stage was when I saw the famous Stephen Daldry production at the Garrick Theatre in London. This was in 1996 towards the end of a long run that had begun at the National Theatre four years earlier. This version was very different from earlier productions, with the possible exception of the first staging in the Soviet Union in 1945 where reportedly minimalist sets were employed. The text envisages a conventional picture stage setting, with the action confined to the dining room of the Birlings’ home. Stephen Daldry’s staging was, in the words of Brian Logan of the Guardian, “an expressionist refit with a three-way time frame. The first was 1912 when the play was set, the second was 1944 when Priestley wrote it, and the third was 1992 at the end of the Thatcher era”. Upstage was the Birlings’ home, a doll’s house on stilts. At the back of the house street children roamed, who were given scraps of food by the maid. The Inspector was first seen under a street lamp wearing a trenchcoat, an image derived from forties film noir and The Exorcist. As he questioned them, each member of the family came down from the house and engaged with the dark world outside. Finally, after the revelations, the house exploded and fell into a ravine.

It all seemed to me less an interpretation of the play than choreography and special effects imposing new meanings on the original. I recall feeling nostalgic for the conventional productions of J.B. Priestley I had seen in the late 1950s at the Independent Theatre.

Above all I remembered the 1954 film adaptation. Happily, this version has just been released on a Blu-ray disc. Sixty years later the film seems to be a richer and more profound work than anyone realised when it was first released. Critics here could not adjust to Alastair Sim as the Inspector after his many appearances in comedy, and regretted that Ralph Richardson had not repeated his stage performance in the film. Viewing the film now, Sim’s performance seems masterly; it captures just the right tone of other-worldly authority and sinister irony. Screenwriter Desmond Davis’s adaptation tones down Priestley’s social criticism and makes the film more of a moral fable.

In a series of beautifully structured flashbacks we are able to see and come to like Eva Smith—the girl who in one way or another the family have helped drive to suicide. The two touching romances in this back story, inspired by the exposition dialogue in the play, are superbly played by Brian Worth as Gerald Croft, and the young Bryan Forbes as Eric Birling, the father of Eva’s illegitimate child. Best of all is Jane Wenham’s haunting performance as Eva. Arthur Young’s Birling Snr may be a monster of class pretension and callousness, and only too willing to take the first opportunity to evade his responsibility, but actor and director still make him human. His remorse may be brief but it is still real. Similarly Olga Lindo’s Sybil Birling is at first arrogant and condescending, and the viewer relishes the Inspector’s revelation of her culpability. But again sensitive direction and a fine performance from Lindo allow us to see that, for all the character’s self-righteousness, her anguish at Eric’s involvement and her own role in Eva’s death is genuine. Like her husband, however, at the first opportunity she evades her responsibility.

Guy Hamilton’s direction is elegant and unobtrusive. While in the play the action was confined to the dining room of the Birling home, Hamilton allows the characters to move naturally into other parts of the house. Fewer group shots are employed than in most adaptations from stage plays. Each character is for a time isolated in the frame, deftly implying that the film is about individual responsibility.

An Inspector Calls is one of J.B. Priestley’s time plays, with at the end the Inspector’s mission remaining ambiguous. And indeed Sim’s Inspector Poole (“Goole” in the play, “Poole” in the film) does appear other-worldly in some of the individual shots. It was done so subtly that one can’t be sure if it was achieved through lighting or with a filter over the lens—perhaps both.

This unpretentious work from the golden years of British cinema comes far closer to the moral core of Priestley’s vision than the flamboyant 1992 National Theatre production with its heavy-handed emphasis on contemporary relevance. Moreover it is very fine film-making.

An Inspector Calls was Guy Hamilton’s third feature—his first was the very enjoyable Edgar Wallace thriller The Ringer, made in three weeks—and he was to become famous for Goldfinger, eventually directing both Sean Connery and Roger Moore in the role of James Bond. These were honest entertainments, and one can’t ignore his splendid work on The Battle of Britain, but I prefer Hamilton’s earlier, more subtle work. In An Inspector Calls he teamed with ace cinematographer Ted Scaife, and the visuals show signs of the young director’s apprenticeship in the French studios in the 1930s where one of his mentors was the great Julien Duvivier.

The film’s screenwriter, Desmond Davis, has to be one of the great all-rounders in British film. He was the camera operator in the early 1960s on Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones and John Huston’s Freud among others. Later in the 1960s Davis became a writer-director on Girl with Green Eyes, The Uncle and I Was Happy Here. Judging from some postings on the internet these films are still fondly remembered. One can savour both Davis’s fidelity to Priestley’s original and the way he imagines what is only described in the play.

In 1954 An Inspector Calls was a modest success. Sixty years later the film can be easily recognised as a small masterpiece.