AFED #41: The Halfway House (UK, 1944); Dir. Basil Dearden
It's sometimes inexplicable how certain films become completely forgotten. Unless you're a devotee of old British horror/supernatural films there's a good chance you've never heard of The Halfway House , yet this Ealing drama prefigures their more celebrated Dead of Night and one suspects its musing on our final destinies could even have influenced Powell and Pressberger's A Matter of Life and Death . Ten people of varying backgrounds are drawn to spend the weekend at a remote guest house in rural Wales. They're a cross section of British wartime society: a famous conductor who has just months to live, a feuding middle-class couple and their adolescent daughter, a retired seaman and his wife still grieving over the death of their son in conflict, a neutral Irishman and his fiancee, a deserter recently released from prison and a racketeer who's made a fortune from the war. Their hosts are the Halfway House's enigmatic innkeeper Rhys (Mervyn Johns) a...