Basil Dearden (1944)
I’m not embarking on a ‘House’ season. By coincidence, 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 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), 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 time standing still 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 that they’re enjoying the opportunity of a time warp – 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, while they’d have had no difficulty identifying with issues faced by the characters, 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/
