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.
And Dennis O'Neill died 80 years ago today.
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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.
