Review of An Inspector Calls – Alastair Sim’s drawing room drama brilliantly exposes the hypocrisies of its era | film

With a half-smile of amused contempt for the obvious subterfuges and absurdities of everyone he interrogates, the inspector tells them that a certain young working-class woman committed suicide by drinking disinfectant; With ruthless calm, he shows each character their photo one by one, awakening in them a guilty association with her. Every single person has something to hide and therefore something to admit – their own share of the group guilt of arrogance, hypocrisy and heartlessness, perhaps especially the red-faced Birling himself, who begins the drama by saying that of course there will be no war ( although this may have been more of an upper-class attitude in the 1930s than in 1912).

The woman herself is Eva Smith (Jane Wenham), once a factory girl in Birling’s works, gradually destroyed by everyone there and reduced to misery by her general cruelty, snobbery and moral cowardice. It is important to remember that in 1912, as in 1954 when this film was made, suicide was a crime; Incredibly, survivors could face criminal prosecution. For those who did not survive, acquaintances and associates of the dead man may have been complicit, and a police inspector did indeed have the right to ask questions and spread fear.

And so the inspector confronts everyone with their own behavior and their own complacency, exposing caste egoism and complacency. (Priestley’s 1934 stage comedy “When We Are Married,” made in 1943, does much the same thing, albeit in a toned-down form.) The drawing-room spectacle is interspersed with an elegant pattern of flashbacks that show us the terrible story of all Eve in five well-made mini background dramas; “An Inspector Calls” almost looks like a very tight suitcase picture.

Of course, one can argue that by showing the younger generation as the morally astute characters present, Priestley is actually treating these people a little more gently than he thinks, but what comes through very clearly is that Eva is treating her elders and betters with hers openness makes you angry; She bravely speaks up for herself and they find it unbearable, which leads to an unbearable new level of irony when Eva refuses to give the name of the young man who impregnated her. At 80 tight minutes, it is a brilliantly constructed work.