Word: inspectors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Inspector Calls (by J. B. Priestley; produced by Courtney Burr & Lessor H. Grosberg) and, finding the smug, well-to-do Birling family all at home, accuses one startled member after another of being partly to blame for a young working girl's suicide. Mr. Birling had once sacked the girl from his factory. On another occasion, Mr. Birling's daughter got her dismissed from a shop. The daughter's fiance had had an affair with the girl; so had Mr. Birling's son, who got her with child; Mrs. Birling had refused her charitable...
...pack of Victorian villains, Playwright Priestley suddenly begins to backtrack. Perhaps, he suggests, the young girl-whom each Birling had known by a different name-was really a great many different girls. Or perhaps the Birlings' visitor (Thomas Mitchell), who certainly didn't act like a police inspector, wasn't one. Perhaps there had never even been a suicide. Perhaps. . . . In his last 20 minutes, Playwright Priestley has a high old time perhapsing. Unfortunately, he has been prosing for so long before that his last-minute fireworks cannot save the play as a whole from seeming tedious...
...year-old Barney Samuel, a city payroller since 1903, tolerated bookmaking even at City Hall. He charged that City Hall workers and some merchants are annually dunned to buy the mayor a birthday present-e.g., a station wagon and a motorboat. Under Samuel, said Dilworth, a police inspector could easily pick up $30,000 a year in graft-and some inspectors were doing it. As for solving the city's acute sewage, parking, paving, housing and airport problems, the mayor has not even come close...
...hours after the beginning of "An Inspector Calls," just as two balconies, an orchestra, and several boxes full of tired and tortured audience are about to give up the ghost, Melville Cooper puts down the telephone and recites a quiet curtain line that makes this J. B. Priestley opus almost worth seeing. That one sentence also reveals spectacularly how good a play the production might have been with even adequate direction or acting...
Thomas Mitchell, moving into the title role created in London by Ralph Richardson, is mournfully inadequate. Instead of making the inspector the mysterious, dominating figure later events show him to be, he is almost friendly in spots. Poor direction may account for a large part of the peculiarly false emphasis maintained almost to the very end, for the production does not seem to wake up to the fact that it is a thriller until too late...