Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

calvinnme ... but this was an excellent British film. I can't really say if it was suspense, thriller, or even fantasy. The beginning has five wealthy people sitting down to dinner with the daughter in the family, Sheila, announcing her engagement to Gerald, who is obviously approved of by the family. The son, Eric, is obviously a cynic. Lots of time is spent having the camera pan over all of the food. The reason why will be obvious later. The father, Mr. Birling, says that the young people are marrying at a time of great prosperity and that war is impossible in 1912, that the world is changing too fast for war (WRONG - won't be the last time either for dear old dad). Then he says that the family must try and stay out of the scandal sheets since he is expecting to be appointed to an important post and with Sheila's upcoming marriage. He really says this last part jokingly, as if anybody in that room could do something scandalous.And out of nowhere a police inspector appears in the dining room doorway. They even mention why he didn't knock. He says he is there because a young woman has just died of poisoning and he needs to ask them a few questions. He says he is not sure if it is suicide or murder. He goes to each family member in turn and shows them a photo of the girl but does not show the same photo to anybody else. Each person remembers the girl, and each did something - sometimes a very small thing just because that person was having a bad day - that led the dead girl on the road to ruin, ultimately placing her in a situation where she was desperate and felt she had no out but suicide. She was young, pretty, and smart, but she had no real family and no money, putting herself at the whim of the upper classes.After all of the revelations, Gerald goes outside for a walk to calm down and runs into a policeman he knows where he learns a shocking fact. What did he find out and what comes of it? Watch and find out.The whole point of the film I think is to show that each of us may be a small pebble on this earth, but in life's pond we can produce big ripples. In concert with other "pebbles" we can start off a chain reaction in a person's life that greatly affects them without really knowing or caring what we did until we are made to care and look at the result of our handiwork.This film was very suspenseful with lots of twists and turns. Alistair Sim was marvelous as the inspector, unfazed and deliberate throughout. I'd highly recommend it.

Prismark10 Alastair Sim stars in this morality tale as Inspector Poole who suddenly appears like a spectre in the house of a provincial wealthy family and interrogates them over the death of a local girl which each members of the family have been associated with.An Inspector Calls is better known as a stage play and here it has been filled out with flashbacks as we find out more about the life of the dead girl and her interactions with the various members of the family.Although the film is set in 1912 it its themes are still relevant today and especially when you see the division in attitudes with the younger characters in the play and the older characters who are not only more selfish but less remorseful that they pretended to be.Sim is sly and powerful as the Inspector who brings down the selfish members of this family a peg or two, he keeps you watching. Jane Wenham is likable as Eva the deceased girl who over time crosses paths with the Birling family and not for the better.

Charlot47 Eschatology is the study of the four last things: death, judgement, heaven and hell. After a death there must be judgement and this will lead to either bliss or damnation. In this film the ghostly Inspector, marvellously played by Alastair Sim, forces a family to face the reality of death, to accept judgement and to choose whether they will repent or stay obdurate. Set in the microcosm of a well-off English household in 1912, the message applies equally to their class and to the nation which they control. When a single working-class woman undergoes what Eva went through, the society which produces it needs reform. No simple solution is given, however. Instead, the story mutely asks us to decide who is my brother and how far am I his keeper.Adapted for the screen by Desmond Davis from the stage play by J.B. Priestley, the film opens out the claustrophobic tale by showing Eva's sad descent in a series of flashbacks, which allow the use of more settings and more characters (including a cameo for George Cole as a tram conductor). Making Eva a neat, quiet, unassuming young woman adds greatly to the pathos, evoking our pity for her fate. Good playing by a young Bryan Forbes, who later switched to directing, as the weak son Eric.

writers_reign 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.