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.
2 comments:
It may or may not be of interest to know that Hermione Baddeley was related to the Asquiths following her marriage to David Tennant.
Again it may or may not be of interest to know that the new Mr & Mrs Tennant achieved some fame and notoriety by organising naked swimming parties with their guests in the lake at their Wiltshire home in the 1930's.
Makes a change from Bungee jumping and falling off a paddle boat in Windermere I suppose.
It is of interest. This was the film she made just after her finest hour in Brighton Rock, by the look of things.
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