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Showing posts with label No Room at the Inn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label No Room at the Inn. Show all posts
I couldn't find room for it in my Lion & Unicorn article about the film No Room at the Inn, but I did blog here about my discovery that the Joan Temple play on which it was based gave John Osborne his first break in the theatre:
After No Room at the Inn had cleaned up in the West End, it went on a national tour, though without its star, the awe-inspiring Freda Jackson.
As there were so many children in the cast, the company needed a tutor for them to make up for the schooling they were missing.
That role was taken by a young man keen on a career in the theatre - he even fancied writing plays. And he used it as a route to becoming an assistant stage manager and then a member of the cast.
His name? John Osborne. He was the archetypal Angry Young Man of the Fifties and the author of the epoch-making play Look Back in Anger.
I was scrolling through the vintage editions of Desert Island Discs on the BBC website and found that Osborne was the castaway in one of them. Only six minutes remain of his 1959 appearance (he was on the programme again in 1982), but during them he confirms this story about No Room at the Inn.
I've written a post for Lion & Unicorn about the 1948 film No Room at the Inn, which starred this blog's hero Freda Jackson. The poet Dylan Thomas was partly responsible for the screenplay.
No Room at the Inn was based on a 1945 play of the same name by Joan Temple. Like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, that play was inspired by the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill on a farm in Shropshire.
Good news: you can watch the 1948 film No Room at the Inn online. And it's the 90-minute version that Talking Pictures TV has shown - there used to be a shorter version online, but that disappeared.
The only downside is that it's on a Russian website, but my antivirus software is happy for me to watch it.
You may recall I got very interested in this remarkable film two or three years ago, in the the harder-hitting play it was based on and in its star Freda Jackson.
The play was first put on in the spring of 1945 and was in part inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill earlier that year - another recurrent subject on this blog.
In the play - here come the spoilers - Mrs Voray does not fall downstairs, but is 'accidentally' smothered by two of the children as they retrieve the coal shed key from her as she lies in a drunken stupor.
It's open to question how accidental that smothering is, but the audience did not mind. A Nottingham Post article on Freda Jackson records that the audience stood and cheered when she got her comeuppance.
Freda Jackson was a wonderful actor. She was Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V, Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations and the farmer Sheila Sim goes to work for in A Canterbury Tale.
Yet, perhaps because of the power of her performance as Mrs Voray here, she ended her career playing grotesques. At least she lived to appear in Blake's Seven.
I've found a 2018 article about Freda Jackson in the Nottingham Post. It's headlined 'The railway porter's daughter from Nottingham who became a Hollywood star', but I don't believe she ever went to Hollywood.
It tells the story of Jackson's career in the theatre, films and television, but let's concentrate on what it has to say about her relations with Errol Flynn - they were in the repertory company at the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Northampton together:
You can understand why notorious womaniser Errol Flynn might have been attracted to Nottingham-born actress Freda Jackson.
Flynn, the dashing actor with matinee idol looks, and Jackson, a dark-haired beauty, shared many a scene together as they learned their craft with the Northampton Repertory Theatre in the years before the Second World War.
The pair reputedly had a relationship but how true that is we will never know - although judging by Miss Jackson’s comments about Flynn after they performed together in a 1934 production of Othello, the attraction might not have been mutual.
"He was not an intellectual man but he was very shrewd," she said in a 1984 interview. "He knew that his supreme good looks were not enough to get him where he wanted to go, so he came to Northampton to learn his job.
"He did learn a lot from us, including how to walk across the stage without looking like something out of a zoo. When he left, he did so in a cloud of unpleasantness after hitting the stage manager, who was a woman."
David Niven's judgement on Flynn, incidentally, was:
"You knew where you were with Errol Flynn. He always let you down."
Here are some notes on 10 British films that are not as well known as I think they ought to be. It's not a top 10 - they are in chronological order - and I'm sure there are plenty more, particularly from recent years decades, that could fairly be included in such a list.
With those caveats entered, let's go.
No Room at the Inn (1948)
Inspired by the death in Shropshire of the foster child Dennis O'Neill, the same scandal that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap, this had already been a huge success as a stage play. The star of the play was Freda Jackson as the voracious Mrs Voray, who took in war orphans for the money and abused and corrupted them. So hated was she by audiences, the story goes, that she needed a police guard.
Jackson repeats the role in the film, and her skill at playing monsters was so great that she became rather stuck with them later in her career. Before No Room at the Inn, she had played Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V and Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations.
The tragic Joan Dowling, who was to take her own life at the age of 26, is notable among the children. A word too for Dora Bryan who, in her first film appearance, steals both Freda Jackson's date and the scene.
This dark film ticks so many of this blog's boxes that it has its own label.
Gone to Earth (1950)
The Shropshire hills filmed in Technicolor by Powell and Pressburger? There's no way I was going to dislike this one. Gone to Earth was a novel by Mary Webb, who had the misfortune to be deeply obscure in her lifetime and become hugely popular soon after her death. In the 1930s you would see coaches in these hills with 'Mary Webb Country' on the front.
Gone to Earth is melodrama whose plot has similarities with Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Jennifer Jones brings Hollywood glamour to the role of the tragic heroine and makes a brave attempt at a Shropshire accent, while David Farrar makes a splendid wicked squire. Look out for George Cole in his first adult role.
The 'Maggie' (1954)
The greatest Ealing comedies are still widely known, but there are some that have been all but forgotten. The Maggie is the best of this second group, and in its dramatisation of an encounter between wily Scots and American big business it looks forward to Bill Forsyth's Local Hero.
An American millionaire makes the mistake of hiring a decrepit Clyde puffer to carry furniture to his holiday home in the Hebrides. He ends less happily than Burt Lancaster in Local Hero.
Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957)
The disorganised Yvonne Mitchell considers herself happily married to Anthony Quayle, but discovers that he is having an affair with the stylish Sylvia Syms.
Because this is a British film from the Fifties, the family has to defeat all threats to it. But the scene in Mitchell tries to change her image to compete with Syms, only to find that everything goes wrong, is horribly painful to watch.
Innocent Sinners (1958)
Ignore the title, which makes it sound like a particularly tacky porn film, this is the most interesting of the children and bombsites films I have yet found. Unlike the others, it has a girl at its centre, and the enemies the children encounter are not the murderers they encounter in those other films but snobbish residents and unsympathetic officialdom.
Here, bombsites are not a place of danger but somewhere working-class children can express themselves and find the privacy they lack in their overcrowded homes.
Tunes of Glory (1960)
Alec Guinness playing a red-haired Scottish officer who has been promoted from the ranks in wartime may sound ridiculous, but he is wholly believable here. Tunes of Glory reminds us what a peerless actor he was.
The film is about the lethal clash between Guinness and John Mills, who plays the upper-class officer who is appointed over his head now that the war is over. Both are flawed but appealing characters, and their tragic battle takes place in front a remarkable supporting cast: Susannah York, Gordon Jackson Dennis Price, Duncan MacRae, Allan Cuthbertson.
You'll recognised the last-named from gourmet night at Fawlty Towers.
West 11 (1963)
Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.
Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?
Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.
Our Mother's House (1967)
A fatherless family of children hide the death of their mother from the authorities by burying her in the garden because they fear being sent to an orphanage.
Among the children are Pamela Franklin, Mark Lester, Phoebe Nicholls (immediately recognisable as Cordelia in the famous television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited) and Louis Sheldon Williams, whose mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the Sixties, as I did for Liberal Democrat News 40 years later.
If all this sounds tacky or exploitative, the wonderful score by George Delerue - innocent, lilting, compassionate - lifts the film to a wholly different level. Add in Dirk Bogarde in a very atypical role, Yootha Joyce and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and there's lots to enjoy.
Comfort and Joy (1984)
This is the film Bill Forsyth made after Local Hero and for some reason it appears to have been forgotten. Bill Paterson, who play a local radio DJ, is left by his girlfriend just before Christmas and then finds himself sucked into the Glasgow ice cream wars after witnessing an attack on a van.
I saw this in a cinema when it came out (which is a worryingly long time ago) and have never seen it again, yet I still remember it.
The Last Resort (2000)
Another one I saw in the cinema - the Renoir at Brunswick Square near St Pancras, since you ask. It taught me that Russian is the sexiest accent in the world and that Paddy Considine is a brilliant actor.
Dina Korzun plays a Russian woman who arrives at Heathrow with her young son, expecting to be met by her English fiancé, He doesn't show and, panicking, she asks for political asylum. As a result, she and her son are sent to a rundown resort and forbidden to leave it.
There they meet a bingo caller, played by Paddy Considine, who goes out of his way to help them. He is surely a good man, yet somehow we don't know whether we should wholly trust him. According to the reviews, he and Kozun improvised much of their dialogue.
Eventually Kozun decides she must grow up and return to Russia, a task in which Considine regretfully helps her.
It can be difficult to keep all your rabbit holes in the air, and it's high time we went back to No Room at the Inn.
This is the film that introduced me to the wonderful actress Freda Jackson. The play on which it is based was in part inspired the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill in Shropshire in 1945, which was the case that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap. (Those first three links are to labels on this blog, so scroll down for plenty of posts each time.)
I recently came across an article on No Room at the Inn by Meredith Taylor, whose chief interests here are Daniel Birt, the film's director, and Dylan Thomas, who co-wrote the screenplay.
After writing about Birt's previous film, The Three Weird Sisters, he turns to No Room:
A sense of the Gothic also infiltrates No Room at the Inn set in the early months of 1940. We witness atmospheric blitzed streets by the railway bridge next to a rundown house that’s definitely on the wrong side of the tracks: all lorded over by Mrs Agatha Voray (Freda Jackson) doing her damn best not to properly look after three young girl evacuees.
The children live in squalor and suffer mental and physical abuse under the care of this coarse woman who invites men (local councillors and shopkeepers) for casual sex and bit of cash to bolster her shopping allowance of ration coupons.
This is good, though Voray is looking after a boy as well as the three girls, and the film is set in motion by her taking in a fourth girl. Indeed, it's Voray's punishment of the boy the precipitates the film's climax.
Taylor continues:
The character of the schoolteacher Judith Drave (Joy Shelton) is remarkable, for we have ... a force for truth-seeking that refuses to be silenced.
A powerfully written and acted moment occurs when Miss Drave, who has complained about Mrs Voray's behaviour, is asked to give evidence at a town councillors’ meeting. They dislike Ms Drave’s assertive manner. When Mrs.Voray has her right to reply she adopts the manner of a humble woman struggling to do her best during wartime restrictions.
The schoolteacher sees right through her performance. But the council members (half of whom have flirted with Voray) believe her account of things over the teacher’s. I love Dylan Thomas’s writing here. His social concern is angrily targeted at bureaucratic corruption and ineptitude.
I don't have a copy of the film - it's easy to buy a copy online, but these are significantly shorter than the version Talking Pictures TV has shown more than once. And that is the copy I would want.
It would be interesting if I had that copy to see how much of Joan Temple's original play survived into the screenplay. Often the original source of a film goes unrecognised - the extraordinary atmosphere of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter is all there in the original novel by Davis Grubb.
Taylor rightly identifies a Dickensian bringing together of different moods as one of the roots of the film's strange power:
Like The Three Weird Sisters there are fascinating if disconcerting alterations of tone – such as the beautifully written bedtime story scene in the room of the young girl evacuees.
Norma Bates (yes, not Norman, though the film has its moments of Hitchcockian darkness) who is played by Joan Dowling, re-interprets the Cinderella story in a ripe, savagely Cockney manner. She comforts the children who are desperate to escape the mean house and its mean housekeeper.
It’s a spellbinding moment of Dylan Thomas poetics: a joyful spin on Cinderella, beautifully shot and executed. And its lyricism is made more poignant by intercutting with Mrs Voray in the pub getting drunk with the sailor father of one of the evacuees.
You can see that bedtime story scene in the video above.
Taylor is critical of the ending of No Room at the Inn, and I would add that the film's prologue, which involves one of the children being caught shoplifting some years later, just isn't strong enough to sit with the darkness of the rest of the film.
This structure of a present-day prologue followed by the rest of the action taking place as a flashback is taken from the play, but that began with the police arriving to find Mrs Voray dead and the play then showing us what had led up to this.
The censors meant that her death in the film had to have been caused by falling downstairs, but in the play she is smothered, more or less accidentally, in a drunken sleep by one of the children. The girls are trying to get her keys off her so they can rescue the boy, who has been locked in the coal store on a freezing night.
I should add that Taylor avoids this big spoiler, but I am not so considerate when a film is 75 years old.
But we can end in agreement as he praises the two best performances in the film:
Freda Jackson brings a full-blooded intensity to the role of the selfish and uncaring Aggie Voray. She was a sensation in the play and that’s why they made a film version which launched her considerable career on stage and in the cinema.
Jackson probably became a role model for actors portraying more authentic working class women. I wonder if Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner) of Coronation Street was influenced by her?
As for all of the child actors in No Room at the Inn well they’re brilliant -especially Joan Dowling who’s street-wise confidence cannot hide her emotional damage. She deserved a prize but unfortunately the BAFTAs didn’t begin until 1954.
Later. It's worth adding that it easy to find a DVD of the film for sale online - it was even on YouTube for a while. That version runs for about 60 minutes, but the one that has been shown more than once by Talking Pictures TV is significantly longer.
When I saw the cast of this 1961 television play included two Liberal England heroes - Freda Jackson and Stratford Johns - I had to have the DVD of it.
Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is a play by John Arden, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1959 to a less than ecstatic reception. Arden himself adapted it for television, and the general view after it was broadcast was that he had made the story easier to follow.
As Wikipedia explains:
The work follows three privates in the British Army and their sergeant, all of whom are deserters from a foreign imperialist war. Serjeant Musgrave and his men, Hurst, Sparky and Attercliffe, come to a northern English coal mining town in 1879, posing as a recruiting party. The community is in the grip of a coal strike and cut off by winter snow.
The soldiers have with them a store of arms and the body of Billy Hicks, a soldier from the town they are visiting who died in that imperialist war.
When Musgrave calls a meeting in the town square:
Instead of recruiting townsmen, Musgrave takes out a Gatling gun. The gun is loaded and pointed at the audience. Then the soldiers hoist up the skeleton of Billy Hicks on a lamppost, still dressed in uniform. Musgrave dances below it reciting a rhyme:
... Up he goes, and no-one knows, who it was that raised him. ... He sits on your back and you'll never, never lose him....
Musgrave talks about the atrocities that followed the soldier's death, and explains that since this single death caused five on the other side, five times five townsfolk should be killed to avenge their deaths.
Whether Musgrave is right or has been seized by religious mania is left open, but his plan fails when his men argue amongst themselves and the dragoons arrive.
First, a word about the look of this television play. Though it originates in the theatre, there is nothing stagey about it. This is television in the round.
At one point the camera shoulders its way through a crowd for a tight close up of one actor's face and, though you don't see cameras or cables, it's obvious that the production is taking place in a studio. There is a strong sense that its makers were exploring the possibilities of a new medium and had not yet settled for making television dramas as much like cinema films as possible.
Patrick McGoohan gives a powerful performance as Musgrave, and you can see a little of him in the video below, along with Ian Bannen, who played the role at the Royal Court,
You can also see Stratford Johns in the video, with stick-on whiskers, playing the mayor, who also owns the coal mines. Musgrave has marked him out as the first against wall and he is no leader.
One of Musgrave's men is played by a young John Thaw in what may have been his first screen role, with the result that the two actors who dominated British police dramas for almost 40 years, as Barlow, Regan and Morse, share the screen here.
And Freda Jackson, as she always seems to be, is magnificent. Sympathetic but no pushover, she holds her own with McGoohan's Musgrave.
Someone writing about her brassy Mrs Voray in the 1948 film No Room at the Inn said the performance looked forward to the powerful Northern women of Coronation Street more than a decade later. The soap opera had just started at Granada when Serjeant Musgrave's Dance was filmed at their studios. And again you feel she would have been wonderful in it.
As to John Arden, I can remember that when BBC Radio 4 broadcast his Pearl, a new play written specially for radio, it was treated as a big occasion. But looking it up, I find that was 45 years ago and I can't recall hearing him mentioned since.
If you thought you'd heard the last of No Room at the Inn, you were mistaken.
This was the play by Joan Temple that, like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, was inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill, a 12-year-old foster child, in 1945.
After No Room at the Inn had cleaned up in the West End, it went on a national tour, though without its star, the awe-inspiring Freda Jackson.
As there were so many children in the cast, the company needed a tutor for them to make up for the schooling they were missing.
That role was taken by a young man keen on a career in the theatre - he even fancied writing plays. And he used it as a route to becoming an assistant stage manager and then a member of the cast.
His name? John Osborne. He was the archetypal Angry Young Man of the Fifties and the author of the epoch-making play Look Back in Anger.
Back to Freda Jackson, who played the villainous Mrs Voray in Joan Temple's play No Room at the Inn and also in the subsequent film. The play, like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, was inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill.
I've come across a couple of accounts of how theatre audiences reacted to her performance.
Her son Julian Bird, who became an actor himself in his sixties after a career as a psychiatrist, spoke to the Guardian:
“I was brought up in a theatre family,” Bird says. His father, Henry Bird, was an artist who designed sets. His mother, Freda Jackson, was an actor, “a name in the 40s, 50s and 60s”.
She was the lead in the play No Room at the Inn, about the abuse of evacuees during the second world war, which was so scandalous that she needed police protection when it transferred to the West End in 1946. “There were always women at the stage door wanting to kill her.”
And I recently found this comment on the IMDb page for the film:
I was Ronnie and my stage name was Stanley Conett (Stanley Heinemann) I played that part for 427 performances at the Winter Garden. Then toured England and Scotland with the show.
Also I did the BBC version. It is a pity that you have published the wrong actor's name for the Winter Garden version of the show. I was too tall to be in the film version.
The Theatre version often caused the audience to erupt with shouting and curses at Freda Jackson. The show ended with the girls suffocating Mrs Voray and it was different in the movie.
All of which goes to support the claim from the Nottingham Post that:
Such was the power of her performance, audiences are said to have stood and cheered when her character was finally vanquished.
The Swedish dramatist August Strindberg once lived in Gravesend. That's our Trivial Fact of the Day taken care of.
I discovered it through my admiration for Freda Jackson. The video above shows her in the town with Michael Redgrave to present a plaque honouring the centenary of Strindberg's birth.
A paragraph in The Stage (Thursday 20 January 1949) tells us exactly what was going on:
Strindberg
The centenary of the birth of August Strindberg falls on Saturday next. The occasion is being marked by the placing of a commemoration plaque on Gravesend Pier, where, in 1893, Strindberg first set foot on English soil and was welcomed by J T. Grein.
The plaque is the gift of Anthony Hawtrey, together with Michael Redgrave, Freda Jackson, and the members of The Father company now playing at the Embassy, and to open at the Duchess on Monday next.
Sponsored by the Strindberg Society, it is to be carried down the river in Sir Alan Herbert's boat and presented to the Mayor of Gravesend.
J.T. Grein was an impresario and critic who helped establish modern theatre in London.
Anthony Hawtrey was an actor and the director of the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, from where many productions transferred to the West End, including No Room at the Inn, which made Freda Jackson famous and which he directed.
Alan Herbert was better known as A.P. Herbert and was a considerable figure of the day.
The plaque is though to be in storage somewhere in Gravesend, while there is talk of selling the pier to Uber Boat, which runs a service from it to the City of London.
There's a false story about the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill, at the age of 12, at a farm under The Stiperstones in Shropshire in 1945.
It's been repeated in several articles on the case and I have had it added as a footnote to something I wrote about it too.
As far as I can tell the story originates from a piece by David Batty published in the Guardian in 2003.
Batty wrote:
The case shook a war weary Britain and there was a national outcry when [Reginald] Gough was jailed for six years for manslaughter. An appeal court ruling changed the verdict to murder and his sentence was extended to 10 years.
This is wrong for three reasons.
The first is that you can't try and convict a person for one crime and then, at a later date, decide you'd rather convict them of another, more serious, crime. You couldn't do it in 1945 and you can't do it now.
If you doubt this, you will find that there's not mention of a later murder conviction in the newspapers of the period. I've looked.
Besides, if Gough had been convicted of murder, the only possible sentence in 1945 was death, even if it was later commuted.
The second reason is that, though there was an outcry over Dennis O'Neill's death, it was not an outcry against Gough but against the authorities. This is no different from today, when we seem angrier with the social workers who fail to protect children than we are with the people who abuse them.
When the report of Sir Walter Monkton's public inquiry into the case was published, the Daily Mirror (29 May 1945) printed the photographs of all 19 members of Newport Borough Council's education committee. This was the committee had sent the the boy to live far from home while doing next to nothing to ensure he was being properly treated.
And the third reason I'm sure that this story is false is that we know Reginald Gough was at liberty by 1951.
On 20 June 1951 the Daily Herald published this short report:
Offence against girl - fined
For an offence against a girl of l5, Reginald Gough, 37-year-old farm labourer, was fined £25 at Shropshire Assizes yesterday. The Judge said there were mitigating circumstances and it was not case for imprisonment.
A police witness said that in 1945 Gough. then a farmer. was jailed for six years for the manslaughter of 13-year-old Dennis O'Neill.
That is more conclusive proof than I expected to find.
The illustration above is the cover of the Canadian edition of Terry O'Neill's book, which was published in the UK as Someone to Love Us in 2010.
Terry was fostered by Reginald Gough and his wife alongside Dennis. His book is a harrowing account of their treatment and it is shocking that the "discipline" Terry later received in children's homes echoed the abuse he and his brother had suffered.
There is also an award-winning BBC Wales radio documentary The Mousetrap and Me, which tells Terry's story.
A readers of this blog will know, Agatha Christie's record-breaking play The Mousetrap was inspired by Dennis O'Neill's case, as was the play and film No Room at the Inn.
You know that film I'm always going on about? Well a version of it has appeared on YouTube.
I say "a version" because this one last only an hour, whereas Talking Pictures TV has shown one ("with previously lost scenes restored") that lasts at least 20 minutes longer.
It's a dark film - in both senses of the word. As I blogged recently, like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, No Room at the Inn was inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill in 1945.
You can see this in the way that at least some of the children are not, as even the film seems to think, wartime evacuees but in local authority care and fostered. At the start of the film one of them is living in the town where she lived with her mother, while others - as the O'Neill brothers were - have been sent far from home.
You can also see it in the way the local councillors are pictured. In the case of Dennis O'Neill, it was the education committee of Newport council in South Wales, which had sent him and his brothers to Shropshire, that aroused the anger of the press.
And, in the film, the detail of Ronnie being locked in the coal shed is obviously inspired by the abuse of Dennis O'Neill too.
The film is dominated by the performance of Freda Jackson, a ferocious actress who was Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations and still around to appear in Blakes 7 more than thirty years later.
I've already told the story about audiences of the original play standing and cheering when her character, Mrs Voray, met her fate.
A Guardian interview with her son Julian Bird, who became an actor in his sixties, went further:
She was the lead in the play No Room at the Inn, about the abuse of evacuees during the second world war, which was so scandalous that she needed police protection when it transferred to the West End in 1946. "There were always women at the stage door wanting to kill her."
Notable too is Joan Dowling as Norma Bates. I find that I posted a film about her before I'd ever heard of No Room at the Inn. She was to marry her co-star from Hue and Cry, Harry Fowler, and take her own life when she was 26.
On a happier note, you can enjoy Dora Bryan's film debut. As the girl in the bar she steals Freda Jackson's date and the scene.
The original play No Room at the Inn was written by Joan Temple, but the film's screenplay is by Ivan Foxwell and Dylan Thomas. Temple's best line survives almost intact though.
In the film Mrs Voray says:
"There ain't much you can tell me about kids. I've buried two of my own."
Whereas in the play it was three., but then jokes in the theatre tend to be broader.
No Room at the Inn is an extraordinary film and certainly not, in that critical cliché, ahead of its time. It's overwhelmingly of its time. What we need now is a DVD of the longer version of the film.
Agatha Christie's record-breaking play The Mousetrap, as a moving BBC Radio documentary reveals, has its roots in the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill on a farm in the Shropshire hills in 1945.
I once suggested that a play that was a scandalous success the same year and later made into film, No Room at the Inn, was inspired by the same sad incident. And a look at the theatre newspaper, The Stage, shows I was right.
Its 5 July 1945 edition reported:
Anthony Hawtrey is to present a new play, "No Room at the Inn," by Joan Temple, at the Embassy, next Tuesday. It tells of the problems of indiscriminate billeting of children, and a strong parallel is drawn to a recent case.
That sounds like information provided by the play's producers and, together with an episode of cruelty in the play that mirrors what happened to Dennis O'Neill, clinches my case.
No Room at the Inn was something of a succès de scandale. A Guardian article on the actor Julian Bird said:
His mother, Freda Jackson, was an actor, "a name in the 40s, 50s and 60s". She was the lead in the play No Room at the Inn, about the abuse of evacuees during the second world war, which was so scandalous that she needed police protection when it transferred to the West End in 1946. “There were always women at the stage door wanting to kill her.”
It seems the O'Neill case remained alive in the public mind for at least a year even though it was later forgotten.
Anyway, the film of No Room at the Inn has been shown on Talking Pictures TV at least twice and is worth keeping an eye out for.
At the end of last year this blog discovered Freda Jackson and Henry Bird - Northampton's power couple of the arts. We also discovered that they had a son, Julian Bird, who, after a career as a psychiatrist, trained as an actor in his sixties.
Julian Bird spoke about his new career with Paula Cocozza in the Guardian:
It is tempting to wonder what his mother, who died in 1990, would have made of his career change. He has worked in TV and theatre for the past 15 years. “I would have loved her involvement and appreciation,” he says. There’s a pause. Recently, he has had “a passing thought. Maybe that freedom was partly possible because they both had gone. I was free of their influence."
Freda Jackson and Henry Bird had a son called Julian. You can find a photo of him celebrating his fourth birthday with his mother and the young cast of the play of No Room at the Inn on the Imago site.
Julian Bird grew up to become a psychiatrist, until his genes reasserted themselves when he was in his 60s and he trained as an actor.
Writing about Freda Jackson, the star of both the play No Room at the Inn and the film made of it, I suggested her husband, the artist Henry Bird deserved a post of his own. But it seems they were very much an item.
Henry regarded talent as an obligation and he served his own with exemplary devotion. He could not understand people who appeared to take art less seriously. Many regretted their hastily expressed opinion too late in the face of one of his uncompromising rebuffs.
His late wife, the actress Freda Jackson, viewed her own art with similar rigour and both of them tended to disdain small talk. Taking a chair between them in Hardingstone House, their home on the edge of Northampton, could be a bit like sitting on the anvil while the blacksmith was at work.
As to their relationship:
They were ... devoted to each other - even if the relationship sometimes seemed to outsiders perplexingly antagonistic - and their admiration for each other's work was unflagging.
Bird came from a poor part of Northampton near the railway station, was a boy chorister at St Peter's and began taking drawing lessons at the age of 11. He took jobs to finance his part-time studies at art school. Eventually he won a scholarship to the Royal School of Art, where he won most of the big prizes.
He became a ferocious tutor himself and produced many works of public art, such as murals, in and around Northampton.
And I find I have photographed one of these myself: the rood screen at All Saints, Earls Barton.
I blogged about the 1948 film No Room at the Inn the other day. Even when I was watching it, I noticed parallels between it and a better-known British film from that year: Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol.
Both involve a death by falling down a staircase that was a murder in the original story. In The Fallen Idol that was Graham Greene's short story The Basement Room and in No Room at the Inn it was the play by Joan Temple.
The above paragraph may contain spoilers.
Both have a performance by a woman actor that brilliantly captures a child's vision of an evil mother figure: Sonia Dresdel in The Fallen Idol and Freda Jackson in No Room at the Inn.
Both feature an early role - in fact these are her first two credited film roles - for the wonderful Dora Bryan.
Talking Pictures TV continues to be a national treasure. A couple of weekend ago screened an extraordinary British film from 1948.
Based on a 1945 play, No Room at the Inn deals with a woman who is paid to take in wartime evacuee children, but spends the money on herself and leaving the children to live in hunger and squalor. It has a strange, dark, fairy tale atmosphere and the screenplay is partly the work of the poet Dylan Thomas.
What really makes the film is the performance of Freda Jackson as the villainous Mrs Voray. A witch to the children, she makes herself attractive to men and plays the wronged saint when her treatment of her young charges is questioned.
I did not recognise her name, but I have seen her before. Before No Room at the Inn she had been a ferocious Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectation and the more sympathetic figure of Prudence Honeywood, the woman farmer Sheila Sim goes to work for in A Canterbury Tale.
And, like many actors from British cinema's golden age, she was still around on television decades later - Freda Jackson appeared in Blake's 7.
Watching No Room at the Inn, I suspected there may have been an even darker story to be told and I was right. Because the film was based on a stage play that had opened in London in July 1945.
And that play has a different ending. In the film the evil Mrs Voray dies after falling down the stairs. But in the play, which I now have a copy of... Let's just say her death is not accidental.
Freda Jackson played the role on the stage too, and a Nottingham Post profile of her records:
Such was the power of her performance, audiences are said to have stood and cheered when her character was finally vanquished.
She is that good in the film too.
Freda Jackson lived in Northampton for many years and was married to the artist Harry Bird, who deserves a post of his own one day.
A play about child abuse that was premiered in the summer of 1945 will have been staged, if not written, in the shadow of the scandal over the death of Dennis O'Neill. And there are details in the play that make you think its author, Joan Temple, had that case and the reaction to it in mind.
It also provides more fuel for my theory - once the subject of a book chapter - that child abuse of all kinds is not the recent discovery that much professional literature believes.
In No Room at the Inn, a woman called Kate Grant goes to the Revd. Allworth to try to get him to help one of the children. The following exchange takes place:
ALLWORTH: I do beg you not to think me unsympathetic. If I told you about the cases I have here! One wretched girl is pregnant - only fifteen, and she's got a bad case of V.D.!
KATE (rising): God in heaven! And with that case before you, you turn your back on a child who may - through neglect - become just such another case one of these days.
Not that the play is without humour. When another character challenges her, Mrs Voray's reaction is:
Well, you can't tell me much about children. I've buried three of me own.
One of the children, incidentally, was played both on stage and screen by Joan Dowling, who I have blogged about before.
You can find a version of the film of No Room at the Inn online, but it lasts only an hour when the version screened by Talking Pictures TV ran for 90 minutes.
