Review of An Inspector Calls

This is one cheezy camp theatre production, taken to film just so they can amp up the kitstch with the stage sets. BUT, and it's uppercase BUT this makes for serious entertainment if viewed along with the deadly serious 1954 version of the play set just before WWI.It's an oldie but easy to download in glorious black and white. Set at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the country the kicked it all off, Britain. When over two thirds of the world was under the royal family's control and masses of rural British folks moving to the cities willingly for 'a better life' (they had it better than the colonies who were kidnapped or indentured into migration across the Atlantic!). Eugenics was the scientific norm, and class/race meant working class people were seen and depicted as subhuman. That setting made the original play very powerful.

Here we are in a millenium where a new mainland power is emerging, there are mass migrations of rural people to the cities working in factories (none left in deindustrialised Britain). Well you can see where I'm going... so why choose frivoluse campness for a remake over the opportunity for a deep deadly serious drama which would bring the original right up to date by being in China?

Watching both versions sides by sides makes for debate along these lines, in fact we're still talking about it as I write this.