Old Yorker

  • The Halfway House

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Basil Dearden (1944)

    I’m not embarking on a ‘House’ season but, a few days after I’d seen The Red House, The Halfway House – on my list of to-see films for some time – turned up on Talking Pictures TV …

    In 1942 Ealing Studios made Went the Day Well?, a fine propagandistic drama directed by Alberto Cavalcanti.  In 1945 Cavalcanti directed two episodes of Dead of Night, Ealing’s famous portmanteau horror film, as did Basil Dearden.  In between, came The Halfway House, where both men had a hand in the direction although Dearden received sole credit with Cavalcanti named as ‘associate producer’.  The film is aptly named for more reasons than simple chronology:  it tries to combine moral exhortation of British wartime audiences, as Went the Day Well? had skilfully done, with supernatural elements, on which Dead of Night would depend.  The latter’s five stories, within an overarching narrative, would include one essentially comic piece (‘The Golfer’s Story’, also the weakest element) but not attempt to combine humour and horror in the other four stories.  In contrast, most of The Halfway House occupies an awkward no-man’s-land between Ealing comedy and Ealing drama.  It’s only in the closing stages, when the film becomes entirely straight-faced, that the supernatural and propaganda aspects start to mesh; even then, the relationship between them is uneasy.  Still, The Halfway House is undeniably a curiosity of Ealing cinema history.

    The source material is Denis Ogden’s stage play, The Peaceful Inn, first produced on the London stage in 1940.  One member of the audience then was George Orwell, whose diary entry for 31 May included the following:

    ‘Last night to see Denis Ogden’s play The Peaceful Inn.  The most fearful tripe.  The interesting point was that though the play was cast in 1940, it contained no reference direct or indirect to the war. …[1]‘

    Ogden’s Dartmoor inn is a place where time stands still, thus offering an assortment of guests the chance to look at themselves and change their ways.  The Halfway House’s screenplay, by Angus McPhail and Diana Morgan (with credited contributions from Roland Pertwee and T E B Clarke), moves the main action to rural Wales.  The film grafts wartime propaganda onto Ogden’s original by supplying the travellers who arrive at the Halfway House with highly topical occupations and situations.  Renowned orchestral conductor David Davies (Esmond Knight), in failing health, is due to tour abroad, as part of the British Council’s cultural diplomacy efforts, but is warned by his doctor (John Boxer) to rest if he’s not to kill himself within three months.  Squadron Leader Richard French (Richard Bird) and his wife Jill (Valerie White), also in uniform, irritably discuss divorce with a solicitor (C V France) and within earshot of their young daughter Joanna (Sally Ann Howes), who’s determined to see her parents stay together.  Ex-Captain Fortescue (Guy Middleton) completes the jail sentence that followed the court martial which ended his military career; as soon as he’s released, embittered Fortescue is pleased to meet up with old acquaintance William Oakley (Alfred Drayton), who’s having a good war thanks to his black-market activities.  The marriage of merchant ship’s captain Harry Meadows (Tom Walls) and his French wife Alice (Françoise Rosay) is in a parlous state following the death in action of their only son, lost in a U-boat attack.  Margaret (Philippa Hiatt), another woman in uniform, faces a dilemma:  she’s in love with yet appalled by Terence (Pat McGrath).  A proud Irishman, Terence isn’t just politically neutral.  He’s on the point of accepting a diplomatic posting in Berlin. 

    The filmmakers take an age to assemble these characters in the title location.  Early episodes introducing them take in Cardiff (David Davies), two London locations (the French family, Fortescue and Oakley) and Bristol (Alice and Harry), as well as ‘Parkmoor’ prison; some of the dramatis personae then coincide on the same train heading for the Welsh countryside.  Once they’re guests at The Halfway House, run by Rhys (Mervyn Johns) and his daughter Gwyneth (Glynis Johns), the place’s unaccountable qualities are soon to the fore.  Mine host, materialising before Fortescue’s eyes, explains that ‘quite a lot of people who don’t know where they’re going arrive here’.  It’s mid-June and the grounds in which the inn stands are bathed in sunshine yet Gwyneth casts no shadow.  To Alice’s consternation, after Rhys brings a pot of tea to her room, there’s no sign of his reflection in the mirror she’s looking into as he turns towards the door.  The date is 21 June 1943 but the inn’s calendar shows the same date a year earlier; the same goes for the selection of newspapers available to guests.  At dinner, Rhys explains that The Halfway House was destroyed by a German bomb on 21 June 1942 – the same date on which Axis forces recaptured Tobruk, as a news bulletin on The Halfway House’s wireless confirms.

    It’s soon obvious to the viewer what’s going on.  Even allowing that the visitors to the inn must, for dramatic purposes, take longer to cotton on, the script is unimaginative.  Each new illustration of the time warp is greeted by the characters concerned as if it were the first:  it’s only David Davies, in a privileged position once Gwyneth tells him not to fear death (it’s only a door to the next world), who twigs things and – to convince his fellow guests of the extraordinary opportunity they’ve been given – twiddles a knob on the wireless to move from BBC news to a Canadian station:  it’s broadcasting live a Toronto concert that David had conducted the previous year.  It’s also clear enough, given their various predicaments, how the guests’ hearts and minds are going to be changed.  The trouble is, Basil Dearden spends so long stressing their mutual tensions and animosities or moral deficits that, when the characters eventually see the error of their ways, their conversion is so easily achieved that it feels mechanical.  It’s also upstaged by their escape from The Halfway House as the longest day of 1942 reaches its dreadful climax, the sirens sound, a bomb falls, and the inn goes up in flames.

    Mervyn Johns was in Went the Day Well?  and would return (unforgettably for me) as the architect trapped in a nightmare in Dead of Night, where Sally Ann Howes would also appear again.  Few of The Halfway House‘s cast were Ealing A-listers, though, and it shows – some of the acting is so ropy that the film is sometimes funnier when it isn’t intending to be.  Honourable exceptions include both Johnses (Mervyn and Glynis were real-life father and daughter), Esmond Knight and Tom Walls.  Sally Ann Howes is nothing if not lively.  Françoise Rosay was a well-established star of French cinema – so much so that her name heads the opening credits, which also explain that this is her first British film:  alas, that comes to read like an excuse for Rosay’s strenuous playing.

    Following a premiere several weeks beforehand, The Halfway House opened in London cinemas on what turned out to be the eve of D-Day.  The film’s first audiences would have had no difficulty identifying with issues faced by the characters but may have felt short-changed by the film as entertainment – which ‘The Story of a Ghostly Inn’, promised on its poster, might be thought to imply.  Crucial as it is, the supernatural aspect of the narrative is never dynamic.  When Alice Meadows, who’s turned spiritualist in her grief, organises a séance at the inn to make contact with her drowned son, the proceedings are presented as ridiculous even before her exasperated husband sabotages them.  By the time that Rhys eventually enlightens his guests about the MO and moral import of The Halfway House, the supernaturalism has switched decisively from weird into pious:  Rhys’ lengthy explanation feels like a sermon.

    Words of praise for The Halfway House aren’t hard to find online but Charles Barr’s judgments in his book Ealing Studios (1977) are in all respects sharper.  Bracketing the film with Ealing’s science-fiction drama They Came to a City – based on J B Priestley’s stage play, released in August 1944 and also directed by Basil Dearden – Barr asks why the later film should be ‘the dismal experience that it is – arid, abstract, statuesquely poised and declaimed (all of which applies equally to [The] Halfway House)’.  It can’t, says Barr, all be blamed on Dearden, none of whose ‘other Ealing films are as bad as these two’:

    ‘More plausible is the hypothesis that Ealing’s form of cinema, like its whole mentality, is a profoundly empirical and naturalistic one, at home with people, not ideas, with the solidly realistic, not the abstract or stylised. … I don’t believe that this is merely a platitude, something that is true of the whole ‘concrete’ medium of cinema itself, or of all British culture:  it manifestly does not apply to the films of Michael Powell.’

    I’ve not yet seen They Came to a City.  As far as The Halfway House is concerned, I think Charles Barr, as so often, is spot on.

    5 June 2025

    [1] https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/31-5-40/

     

     

  • The Red House

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Delmer Davies (1947)

    A tale of what lies hidden within dark woods, Delmer Davies’ black-and-white thriller begins in open country and bright sunshine.  A male voiceover – assured, amiable, never identified – describes the rural setting:  how this land, once covered in forest was tamed and darkness expelled – except, that is, for the Oxhead woods. One of several trails crisscrossing the woods leads to a farm, a place with, according to the voiceover, ‘the allure of a walled castle that everybody knows about but few have entered’.  The farmer is Pete Morgan (Edward G Robinson), who lives with his sister Ellen (Judith Anderson) and works the land alone despite the handicap of a wooden leg.  The household’s third member is Meg (Allene Roberts), the Morgans’ ward.  She’s one of the teenagers seen travelling home on a school bus in the prologue to The Red House, which Delmer Davies adapted from George Agnew Chamberlain’s novel of the same name.  Meg’s companions on the bus include the school flirt, Tibby Rinton (Julie London), and clean-cut Nath Storm (Lon McAllister), who are going steady.  It’s soon clear, though, that Meg is keen on Nath, too:  she brings him back to the farm and persuades Pete, in whose eyes Meg can do no wrong, to take Nath on as a part-time farm hand, outside school hours.  As for Tibby, she alights from the bus and bumps into a man slouching at the roadside.   This is Teller (Rory Calhoun), a disreputable local, paid by Pete to patrol the woods with a rifle to keep trespassers away.  ‘I’m good at things they don’t teach at school’, Teller insolently tells Tibby.  She acts demure in his presence – at first, anyway – but is clearly attracted to him.

    It’s revealed at an early stage that Pete lost his leg in an accident in the Oxhead woods, where the title location is situated – and decidedly out of bounds.  On Nath’s first evening at the farm, after supper with the Morgans, he prepares to start his long walk home and decides to take a short cut through the woods.  Pete warns him not to because ‘the screams from the Red House … will lodge in your bones all your life’.  He shouts this warning outside the farmhouse, in a howling gale.  Nath ignores it but soon loses his bearings in the dark, is spooked by the sounds he hears and turns back; he eventually makes it to the farm, where he stays the night.  For Meg, locating the Red House exerts a growing and an irresistible fascination – the result of her uneasy intuition and Pete’s increasingly disturbing behaviour.  She and Nath start searching the woods on Sundays – Nath’s day off from the farm – until, one Sunday, he can’t get out of a date with Tibby and Meg goes it alone.  She finds the Red House but, as she hurries back home, Teller fires several shots to scare her away; terrified, Meg falls down a slope and breaks her leg.  When Nath learns that she’s missing, he ventures into the woods to find Meg and carries her back to the farm.  Pete is enraged that his orders were disobeyed – even more enraged when he finds out that Nath has climbed a tree to visit Meg in her bedroom.  He fires Nath on the spot.

    The main locations work splendidly as expressions of psychological planes and, in Pete Morgan’s case, pathology.  For Pete, the farm is a safe, virtually private world:  a newcomer even there, let alone in Oxhead woods, is tantamount to a trespasser.  Nath’s arrival destroys the homestead’s, and its owner’s, equilibrium – heralds a loss of innocence.  Pete’s view of his farm isn’t shared by other locals.  The opening voiceover, referring only to the place’s shadowy seclusion, contrasts it with Tibby’s father’s farm – the words ‘Joe Rinton, like the other farmers hereabouts, is up and coming – raises good apples …’ accompany a sunlit shot of cantering horses and trees in blossom.  At that first supper with Pete, Ellen and Meg, Nath genially reveals that they’re known as ‘the mysterious Morgans’ and, when Pete asks him to explain what he means, the local gossip that Meg’s ‘real mother and father left her when she was a baby’.  The dense, uncultivated woods are the realm of irrational forces – and, in the person of Teller, someone of sexual experience beyond that of the uninitiated Meg, Nath and, for all her sexpot posturing, Tibby.

    All but one of those trails that crisscross the Oxhead woods ‘wander vaguely’ there, and the same goes for Freudian intimations in the narrative.  Meg’s de facto parents are a brother and sister.  Pete, in his desperate desire for the world of the farm not to change, is a limping case of arrested development:  his influence certainly arrested the development of his sister.  We learn that Ellen was in love with the local doctor (Harry Shannon, seen briefly when he treats Meg’s leg injury), as he was with her; instead, she stayed single to keep house for her unmarried brother and raise Meg.  Even the occasional and lightweight scenes between Nath and his widowed mother (Ona Munson), who runs a small convenience store, strike some curious notes.  When Nath is encouraging his mother to remarry, their conversation sounds, paradoxically, like that of a married couple; when she ties the knot and prepares to go on honeymoon with her new husband (Walter Sande), Nath and his mother, after exchanging meaningful looks, kiss each other on the lips.  Not one of these Freudian hints is overworked by Delmer Davies; together, they contribute to The Red House’s highly charged and confounding atmosphere.

    In comparison, the uncovering of Pete Morgan’s dreadful secret is protracted and the nature of the secret conventional.  Pete and Ellen claim that Meg’s parents left the area in search of a new farm, leaving their infant in the Morgans’ care, but died shortly afterwards, after which Pete and Ellen legally adopted Meg.  The truth is that Pete rented the Red House to Meg’s parents.  He was in unrequited love with the woman, Jeanie, before she married; his obsessive desire for her continued to grow; Jeanie and her husband therefore decided to move away; in a showdown, Pete killed them both and buried their bodies in an icehouse adjoining the Red House.  To cut what becomes a long story short, things end fatally for Pete and Ellen, badly for Teller, and happily for Meg and Nath who, in the film’s closing scene, look to the future together.  Tibby, who had tried to elope with Teller, is presumably meant to have learned the error of her irresponsible ways.

    It’s not quite fair, though, to distinguish The Red House’s undercurrents and denouement as sharply as this.  Although Pete Morgan wants Meg to remain the young girl he has always loved and who has loved him back, he’s increasingly delusional and starts seeing her as Jeanie – and calling her Jeanie.  In one sense, it’s just as well that he does; if he didn’t, the sequence in which Pete stands beside the lake where Meg has been swimming and tells her, ‘This is the way it could always be’ would be too creepy.  As it is, Pete adds the word ‘Jeanie’ to that remark; Meg is still understandably disturbed but the film’s audience rather less so.  A few plot elements don’t add up but you accept them because the narrative momentum is so strong.   The melodrama of The Red House reaches such a pitch that this is an instance where a Miklós Rózsa score doesn’t seem excessive, even when Rózsa brings in a theremin.

    The acting is variable.  Judith Anderson plays Ellen rather emphatically.  As Teller, Rory Calhoun is less a hunk than a block of wood.  Julie (‘Cry Me a River’) London, though rather better, is an effortful vamp – and you never feel this is because her character is working too hard to be vampish.  It never makes sense that Tibby and Lon McAllister’s neat, faintly prim Nath are an item but he and Allene Roberts’ very pretty, long-suffering Meg are made for each other.  Roberts is sometimes a bit too pained so it’s a real help that McAllister also brings mild quirky humour to proceedings.  It’s no surprise that Edward G Robinson, small of stature, towers over his fellow cast members.  Almost every time I see a Robinson performance, I’m struck by how ahead-of-its-time his acting seems.  That’s certainly the case here.  He describes Pete Morgan’s journey from wary suppression of his past into resurgent mania with extraordinary skill and inner force.

    Robinson was a favourite actor of the late Ray Deahl, to whose memory this BFI screening of The Red House was dedicated.  A BFI member for more than fifty years (and for six of those a BFI Member Governor), Ray Deahl died last year.  When I read about this special event, his name meant nothing to me.  As soon as I sat down in NFT1 and saw his image on the screen, I recognised him – especially the mac he always seemed to wear to screenings.  The introduction to The Red House, comprising assorted memories of Ray Deahl, was a classic example of how BFI membership can be exasperating and enjoyable at the same time.  The supposedly ‘brief’ intro went on far too long and was sloppy in several ways.  But it was also highly informative and entertaining – thanks chiefly to Ray Deahl’s sister Karen (?), who was on stage to answer questions.  The best moment of all came when she illustrated her cineaste brother’s educational influence on several generations of their family.  When Karen’s granddaughter was still only a young child, her school class was asked by a teacher to name their favourite film.  Except for one, they all came out with the latest blockbuster or similar.  Ray Deahl’s grand-niece went for All About Eve.

    30 May 2025 

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