One must appreciate the brevity of AN INSPECTOR CALLS, running a breathless 80 minutes and directed by future 007 helmer Guy Hamilton, the whole story is condensed into one single night in 1912, the Birlings, a silk-stocking British family celebrates the engagement of Sheila (Moore) and Gerald Croft (Worth), with the presence of her parents Arthur (Young) and Sybil (Lindo), and her already tipsy brother Eric (Forbes).
The festivity is precipitately interrupted by the advent of Inspector Poole (Sim), who simply materializes out of thin air in the dining room (instead of coming from the main entrance, which is differed from J.B. Priestley’s source play), attendant with an ominous score, which foreshadows something that turns out to be rather surreal. Poole claims that he is investigating an apparent suicidal case of a young woman named Eva Smith (Wenham, first wife of Albert Finney), and in a sequential order, he tactically and competently proves that Arthur, Sheila, Gerald, Sybil and Eric, to different extents, all should be answerable for Eva’s despondency and her ultimate demise, but cagily, he only shows the picture of Eva (who later rechristened as Daisy Renton) to one individual a time.
Flashback is concisely interspersed to reveal each of the quintet’s respective involvement in Eva’s downward spiral, to them, she is a recalcitrant employee, an impudent shop assistant, a low-hanging damsel in distress, an insolent charity seeker and a good-hearted sympathizer who cannot resist boyish charm. Subjugated to iniquity and cruelty (a cocktail of sexual agendas, moral haughtiness, peer jealousy, capitalistic cupidity and lack of empathy), Eva/Daisy represents the countless, down-trodden have-nots whose misfortune is cumulatively (if unintentionally) sealed by bias, selfishness, wantonness of those well-to-do members of the society, this message is bluntly blurted out by Sheila in a later stage, which shows Priestley’s lenient stance towards the younger generation’s repentance and malleability, at the same time counterpoises the older one’s fossilized intractability.
But bewilderment remains, apart from whether Eva/Daisy is the same person, or even if she really exists at all, once Poole’s identity is being challenged, and screenwriter Desmond Davis fine-tunes the play’s ending by doubling down the mystical impact, not just Poole might be a compassionate soothsayer, also suggested by his entrance and attested by his egress, he might be entirely the figment of the Birlings’s consciousness.
Performance wise, the core cast is solid if nothing too spectacular to bowl audience over, mainly thanks to the rote dialogue and narrative development (except that shark-jumping ending), Priestley has good conscience and intention, but his wording, more often than not, feels prosaic and didactic. Among them, Sim’s gravitas vehemently holds sway; future director Forbes exudes a disarming facet that might alleviate Eric’s cardinal foibles a bit; Lindo’s matriarchal Sybil is a grand dame, but all things considered, her moral superiority is the least deplorable attribute in the context (where a lippy Eva doesn’t pass muster as a sympathetic beseecher), yet, she has to take the blow for being a mollycoddling mother, a faint whiff of sexism plumes out inadvertently. Last but not the least, it is Wenham’s embodiment of Eva’s throbbing vulnerability that stands out, a young woman whose self-knowledge and kindness cannot save her from perdition, right from her hearty laughter in the very first scene to a misty-eyed dejection in the very last one, she is the soul of this approachable parable, proselytizing us to heed the collateral damage of our day-to-day comportment.
referential entries: Hamilton’s GOLDFINGER (1964, 6.4/10), THE MIRROR CRACK’D (1980, 6.2/10).
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