No Room at the Inn (1948)

Directed by Daniel Birt, and with a script co-written by Dylan Thomas (from the Joan Temple play), this witty and unsettling movie features a barnstorming performance from Freda Jackson as Mrs. Voray, an on-the-make harridan terrorising evacuees and orphaned kids placed in her care in a Northern town during WII. Jackson had played this role on stage and it shows: her memorable performance is forceful but nuanced, and even finds some sympathetic notes in a pretty heinous character. An evocative portrait of war-time Britain, the film has some memorably tart dialogue that raises gender and class issues without fuss, good performances from its child actors, and a superb scene in which our anti-heroine expertly manipulates the smitten men-in-power at a town council meeting. With lost gems like this, as well as all the bona fide classics of the time, the '40s were truly a Golden Age in British filmmaking, seems to me.