The concept sounds interesting and I wanted to like this film; but in practice it didn't really draw me in.
It's more or less a portmanteau picture, where multiple separate stories are presented under an umbrella device (in this case, travellers all staying at the same inn), but it doesn't work so well as, for example, "Dead of Night", which Ealing was to bring out a couple of years later. All the characters end up getting rather cursory treatment, possibly due to lack of screen time; my instinctive reaction was that the various guests don't really interact with each other, but I'm not sure this is strictly true. Still, I feel that the only case where the ensemble really has an effect on the outcome is in the case of the sea captain and his wife, where it is precisely the interaction with strangers that is significant in tipping the balance...
Special effects are, unfortunately, rather clumsy. This really wouldn't matter if they hadn't been gratuitously introduced in the first place: if the script hadn't made such a to-do over characters 'not casting a shadow', I wouldn't have found myself noticing all the subsequent occasions in which they most undoubtedly do so, not to mention the fact that a shadow is, alas, clearly visible beneath the girl's feet in the very scene in question. Likewise back-projection on the close-ups would be less noticeable if the long shots of the same scene hadn't shown that the characters actually were present on location at the time... Technical facilities during wartime were, obviously, limited and this sort of thing wouldn't matter if the film itself had been more absorbing; but sadly it evidently wasn't.
The innkeeper and his daughter are presented as unwarrantedly saintly by virtue of being dead; they are clearly supposed to have a direct line to The Truth, and everything they say is to be taken as gospel. It did come across as a bit heavy-handed, and a lot of the film suffers from this same preachy atmosphere: it's almost a Ministry of Information production lecturing on how the populace should handle Problems of Wartime. Sally Ann Howes has a "Parent-Trap" role which is generally directed to provide comic relief, though she has a couple of effectively-played moments as the little girl out of her depth in the middle of divorce; Esmond Knight, as the only man with prior knowledge of the inn's fate, has little to do but play the piano in the background.
(I did find this character's Acceptance of Fate particularly baffling; he is informed at the outset that he has only a few months to live if, and only if, he continues sacrificing his health to his work, and that otherwise he may live on for years. He arrives at the Halfway House with the specific intention of taking a rest, thus presumably having taken the doctor's warning to heart. And yet his final outcome is to accept imminent death -- a death that will surely only occur if he persists in his self-destructive conducting schedule? David Davies is no R.J.Mitchell, nor even a Vicky Lester -- driving himself to death will not save Britain, or even create irreplaceable art. So why does the film lecture us that he needs to contribute to his own demise, rather than simply slow down a little and save his talent for future performances?)
"The Halfway House" does contain some lovely landscape photography of Wales, and there are some charming and effective scenes. But I wouldn't honestly bother recommending it to anyone as a long-lost Ealing gem, and -- ironically for a picture whose plot revolves around an inn suspended in time since its destruction -- it doesn't possess that timeless quality that enables the best of British films to go on entertaining long after their intended audience has passed.
It's more or less a portmanteau picture, where multiple separate stories are presented under an umbrella device (in this case, travellers all staying at the same inn), but it doesn't work so well as, for example, "Dead of Night", which Ealing was to bring out a couple of years later. All the characters end up getting rather cursory treatment, possibly due to lack of screen time; my instinctive reaction was that the various guests don't really interact with each other, but I'm not sure this is strictly true. Still, I feel that the only case where the ensemble really has an effect on the outcome is in the case of the sea captain and his wife, where it is precisely the interaction with strangers that is significant in tipping the balance...
Special effects are, unfortunately, rather clumsy. This really wouldn't matter if they hadn't been gratuitously introduced in the first place: if the script hadn't made such a to-do over characters 'not casting a shadow', I wouldn't have found myself noticing all the subsequent occasions in which they most undoubtedly do so, not to mention the fact that a shadow is, alas, clearly visible beneath the girl's feet in the very scene in question. Likewise back-projection on the close-ups would be less noticeable if the long shots of the same scene hadn't shown that the characters actually were present on location at the time... Technical facilities during wartime were, obviously, limited and this sort of thing wouldn't matter if the film itself had been more absorbing; but sadly it evidently wasn't.
The innkeeper and his daughter are presented as unwarrantedly saintly by virtue of being dead; they are clearly supposed to have a direct line to The Truth, and everything they say is to be taken as gospel. It did come across as a bit heavy-handed, and a lot of the film suffers from this same preachy atmosphere: it's almost a Ministry of Information production lecturing on how the populace should handle Problems of Wartime. Sally Ann Howes has a "Parent-Trap" role which is generally directed to provide comic relief, though she has a couple of effectively-played moments as the little girl out of her depth in the middle of divorce; Esmond Knight, as the only man with prior knowledge of the inn's fate, has little to do but play the piano in the background.
(I did find this character's Acceptance of Fate particularly baffling; he is informed at the outset that he has only a few months to live if, and only if, he continues sacrificing his health to his work, and that otherwise he may live on for years. He arrives at the Halfway House with the specific intention of taking a rest, thus presumably having taken the doctor's warning to heart. And yet his final outcome is to accept imminent death -- a death that will surely only occur if he persists in his self-destructive conducting schedule? David Davies is no R.J.Mitchell, nor even a Vicky Lester -- driving himself to death will not save Britain, or even create irreplaceable art. So why does the film lecture us that he needs to contribute to his own demise, rather than simply slow down a little and save his talent for future performances?)
"The Halfway House" does contain some lovely landscape photography of Wales, and there are some charming and effective scenes. But I wouldn't honestly bother recommending it to anyone as a long-lost Ealing gem, and -- ironically for a picture whose plot revolves around an inn suspended in time since its destruction -- it doesn't possess that timeless quality that enables the best of British films to go on entertaining long after their intended audience has passed.