L'auberge fantôme

Very imaginative plot, good acting and photography, typical wartime mature subject life and death British quality.

Mervyn Johns and his real life daughter Glynnis shine in this ghostly 1944 film and I disagree with most of the negative comments from other users above.Consequently I have rated this film 7/10.The other users seem to have either forgotten or misunderstood the average conditions that Britons were living under then and indeed up to 1955 when food rationing was abolished in the UK.

London Live TV station here in the UK is currently running a festival of Ealing films Mon-Sat starting @ 2p.m. which gives a chance for this slightly younger viewer (born in 1946), the chance to see their less frequently aired films.I notice they do tend to repeat these films so people who miss the original showing can catch up with it.This was my first viewing 17/7/15 and me and my wife (born 1947) enjoyed it immensely.I take on board the criticism of rather preachy dialogue about redemption but Britain dare I say was a more formally religious country then.Atonement for past misdemeanours was understandable with the population facing unexpected death from the V1 & V2s.

A random group of characters go to the Halfway House in Wales to get away from the pressures of their daily lives. The innkeeper Mervyn Johns (Rhys) and his daughter Glynis Johns (Gwyneth) are on hand to greet the guests and give them advice. However, they don't seem to have reflections, they don't have shadows and they are living 1 year in the past - the calendar, the newspapers and radio broadcasts are out of date and the guest book hasn't been signed for a year. Who are the mysterious owners and what fate awaits the guests....?

The acting from some of the cast seems a bit stiff at times but the film keeps you watching. I like the more touching scenes, for instance, when Glynis Johns talks to the conductor Esmond Knight (David Davies) in the kitchen and tells him to come over to her "side", and the moment when they agree to see each other the next morning, knowing the fate of the inn. Captain Tom Walls (Harry Meadows) also has an impressive character transformation through the course of the film. It is a film with a mixture of strange incidents and it has, I think, an ambiguous ending. After several views, I think I get what happens…."Yea though I walk through the valley of death..........."

I've seen this film several times since the early '60s and I liked the story and plot which was really different to most other Ealing films I have seen. Loosely based on an unsuccessful play, it gained its idea from a somewhat odd incident when a single bomb fell on an inn in what was then a small Welsh village. The inn was destroyed but nothing else was by way of property, the 'bomb' was not dropped as a result of known enemy aircraft and absolutely NO OTHER bombs were dropped in the area, ever and it was never established definitively from where the bomb came. It's set in a beautiful area and I don't pretend to know how things were in the 1940s but as far as the unspoilt countryside, single lane roads and lanes, low human count, it could have been the '50s. The Inn concerned cannot initially be seen by one regular visitor played by Guy Middleton accompanied by a friend, then when he DOES see it in the distance lying low down in a vale, they share a cycle and when they arrive are greeted welcomly. Then more 'guests' arrive, a couple at the point of ending their marriage, another older couple who have lost their son during the War she being into the Spirit World. Other people make up the numbers and the whole film has an air of strangeness and mystery about it. The publican is played by Mervyn Johns (Went the Day Well) and his real life daughter Glynis is in the part of his daughter in the film. Valerie White (Hue and Cry) also stars. I tried to "locate" the Inn or site of it on Google Maps from limited info but unfortunately was unable to.

This was the first Ealing film I saw, knowing it was an Ealing film, because it was shown as part of a long Ealing film series on UK BBC2 from May 1977. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although then at 18 years old the wartime propaganda element of it paradoxically irritated much more than it does forty years later. Is it blood running cooler or a more resigned luxury of perspective in operation? I feel I have to repeatedly point out with British films made in wartime that present day allowances must be made: if the people in this movie had lost the war they were fighting I wouldn't be here writing this nor you reading it. But if the people who made the film could come back would they think their efforts then were worthwhile is another matter though… Every week during that TV series my admiration and awe grew until I realised that British cinema would never again match the art and craft displayed by Ealing at their peak in the '40's and '50's; and by now I've watched some of their classics over a dozen times. However I find that I've seen The Halfway House for only the fourth time - maybe it was meant to be revisited only once in a while, like the ghostly inn itself.

A group of relatively unhappy temporal travellers find themselves drawn to and ensconced in a weird country inn in Wales complete with an unsettling landlord and his daughter who cast no shadows but end up casting large ones over the guests (and us), and for their own good. They were all fighting their own battles and problems but I admit! the biggest problem was that mine host Mervyn Johns was so firmly robotic in his anti-Nazi propaganda and posturing that his imperiousness ultimately became unconvincing and tiresome. It's a very gentle ghost story but at least it wasn't a musical like Brigadoon. Rather moralistic too and there's an array of familiar faces in here to back it all up: Tom Walls, more taciturn now; Alfred Drayton, Joss Ambler and rakish Guy Middleton, all as sharp as ever; Esmond Knight, in rural Wales one year before he memorably played a village idiot and a psycho in rural England; Sally Ann Howes, so posh you realise what today's inclusive society has lost or gained depending on your own prejudices. Sure that's not Wylie Watson playing one of the Welsh porters? There's plenty of beautiful atmospheric photography amid some lovely country and excellent sets. Favourite bits: Johns in a remarkably underplayed scene of mirror-trickery and his daughter Glynnis – like Peter Pan, in a clever for the time scene of shadow-trickery; the extended dinner conversation.

There's a few trite moments mainly involving the belief in the afterlife and the acting is rather stagey at the best of times but all in all it's still great escapist entertainment, which has imho er withstood the test of Time. And to hopefully echo back to the cast Glynnis's gentle farewell: good night to you all, see you in the morning.