Robert Enders (1978)

The poet Stevie Smith, born in Hull in 1902, was three years old when she moved to London with her mother and elder sister Molly.  (The girls’ father, in the words of his younger daughter, ‘ran away to sea’ and remained conspicuous by his absence, save for the occasional twenty-four-hour shore leave or postcard.)  The trio took up residence at 1 Avondale Road in Palmers Green, where Stevie lived the rest of her life[1].  Robert Enders’s Stevie, for the most part, reflects this.  Enders opens with sepia footage of the family’s first arrival, by horse-drawn cab, in Avondale Road.  The film then switches to colour, showing the adult Stevie’s return home from work, via Southgate tube station.  Once the camera has followed her indoors, it spends most of its time there, especially in the living room.  The interiors have a pinkish-brown tinge; for a few moments, I wondered if this was a subtle echo of the sepia introduction – a suggestion of the past being ever-present in Stevie Smith’s world.  It wasn’t long before I realised it was just another instance of the way that so much 1970s film stock has faded.

Enders’s priority isn’t sophisticated visuals but to record on screen what he considered an outstanding piece of acting, Glenda Jackson’s interpretation of Stevie Smith.  Hugh Whitemore’s screenplay was adapted from his own stage play, in which Jackson had played the title role in 1977.  This was the only feature film that Enders directed but he produced, as well as Stevie, three other pictures in which Jackson starred – The Maids and Hedda (both 1975) then Nasty Habits (1977) – and was clearly an admirer.  In the early stages, he shows signs of an anxiety familiar in translations of plays to the screen: he wants to make the stage-derived material ‘cinematic’.  He inserts a few more sepia flashbacks, which do no more than corroborate words that Glenda Jackson is speaking, or has already spoken.  Enders sensibly seems to decide they’re a waste of time, and drops them.  If he wanted more visual variety, it’s surprising he didn’t make use of Smith’s drawings – perhaps there were copyright issues involved.  (Only one of the drawings appears:  Stevie is amused to come across it in a drawer, where she’s looking for a pair of gloves.)

Stevie Smith’s existence wasn’t entirely sequestered.  As well as her many years at work – as a senior secretary at Newnes, the magazine publishers – she developed a social life in London literary circles.  But Enders resists, more than do most directors bringing theatre pieces to the screen, the temptation to open things out.  The largely unchanging setting captures the essence of Stevie’s modus vivendi; it’s refreshing to see a director valuing his material for what it is (even if it probably helps his single-mindedness that he’s not a natural film-maker).  On the rare occasions that Stevie is seen outside 1 Avondale Road (which looks to be mid-street, in spite of its number), she’s always en route to re-entering the house.  One time, getting out of a car and brightly thanking whoever’s given her a lift home, she’s tipsy enough to go in at the wrong front gate, not realising her mistake until she tries to put her key in the door.  In a sharply contrasting homecoming, she emerges gravely from a car that’s brought her back from the office.  Her wrists are bandaged; the elderly aunt (Mona Washbourne) with whom Stevie shares her home watches from the front doorstep in obvious distress.

It takes a little time to get used to the film’s decidedly theatrical nature.  Jackson’s Stevie isn’t the only person on screen to speak regularly to camera/the audience.  Mona Washbourne’s Aunt also does so occasionally and the character played by Trevor Howard pretty well always, though he’s on screen for much less time.  Howard is ‘the Man’, an unnamed member of the literary world.  He evidently knew Stevie well, though he shares only one scene with her, when he arrives at her home to drive her to a poetry reading.  He first (and last) appears in the living room at Avondale Road in the aftermath of Stevie’s death (which occurred not too long after her aunt’s, in 1968).  He takes a volume of Smith poems from a bookcase, sadly repositions a cushion in a now empty armchair.  This quasi-narrator figure is very much a stage device and sometimes looks it yet Howard is increasingly impressive.  One of Enders’s few visits to the outside world takes the camera to a lake scene, as Stevie’s voice on the soundtrack talks about her best-known poem, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’.  Your heart sinks:  is Enders going to reconstruct the scene that the poem describes?  The camera then moves to the Man, seated beside the lake.  He gets up and walks in another direction, and Howard reads ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ – superbly.

The same goes for Glenda Jackson’s more frequent reading of the poems.  These serve as a reminder that a poet’s life is liable to be dramatised more successfully than the life of other kinds of writer – especially if the poems tended to be short.  A selection of them can then be quoted entirely and the audience gets a direct sense of what made the writing remarkable, something much harder to do in a playwright or novelist biopic.  Stevie‘s theatricality helps here, too.  Jackson is almost continuously voicing the protagonist’s thoughts.  It seems quite natural when these are expressed as a poem.

She seems a surprising choice to play the apparently unintimidating Stevie Smith but this is one of Glenda Jackson’s finest screen performances.  Although her powerful delivery doesn’t sound like the original, Jackson’s portrait is emotionally layered and this does come through in her voice – her tone is often wry – as well as her face and movement.  Because she’s realising the inner as much as the outer woman, Jackson’s forceful presence and fierce articulacy (she delivers her many lines at high speed and with remarkable fluency) make complete sense.  She conveys Stevie Smith’s clarity of mind, and imaginative energy.  With Jackson in the role, there’s no danger either of Stevie’s getting played as a fey eccentric.

Their aunt Madge Spear joined the Smith household in Avondale Road when Stevie and Molly’s mother became ill.  The latter died when Stevie was sixteen; Madge stayed on and continued to keep house.  Her real name is never mentioned in the course of the film, respecting the fact that Stevie always referred to her as ‘the Lion Aunt’:  ‘Don’t you think she’s like a lion?’ Glenda Jackson asks the viewer.  Aunt is (as Stevie knows when she puts the question) almost comically un-leonine to behold yet the epithet comes to make sense:  there’s something unconsciously lion-hearted about this little old lady.  Mona Washbourne was often good in minor parts (in Yield to the Night, for example) but Stevie, made when she was in her mid-seventies, gave her a bigger role than usual.  Washbourne makes the most of the opportunity.  Her Aunt, experiencing something close to delight as she organises Stevie’s and her meals and simple menus, is a truly lovable figure.  She’s also the prism that illuminates Stevie.

As Glenda Jackson’s more private expressions reveal, Stevie is acutely aware of the two sides of the domestic coin.  The predictability of Aunt’s routines is both stultifying and reassuring to her niece but there’s never a doubt that home is where Stevie’s heart is.  The timeframe of the scenes involving them both seems to extend from the late 1940s to whenever in the 1960s Aunt dies.  Explicit chronological clues are few.  Early on, Aunt, reading the back page of the Evening Standard, is pleased to see that ‘Pancho Gonzales is doing well – into the quarter finals’.  If this is the Wimbledon men’s singles, the Standard is publishing fake news:  the furthest Gonzales ever got was the round of the last sixteen.  Never mind, it’s the thought that counts and his one appearance in the fourth round during his amateur career came in 1949[2] – Aunt’s remark sort-of gives us our bearings.  Stevie Smith retired from Newnes, with a full pension, in 1953, following a suicide attempt at work – to which the bandaged wrists moment obviously refers.  Near the end of the film, Stevie entertainingly describes her visit to Buckingham Palace to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and her meeting with the Queen, which was in 1969.  Changes in Jackson’s and Mona Washbourne’s appearance show that time is passing but it’s right that we’re rarely aware of exactly how much time:  the changelessness of much of what goes on inside the Avondale Road semi is part of the texture.

Stevie says how much she regrets that the Lion Aunt didn’t live to enjoy hearing about the Buckingham Palace visit:  her much-loved relative is important in illustrating an aspect of the poet’s attitude towards mortality less well known than her view of death as a merciful release.  Hugh Whitemore’s script gives the latter view plenty of coverage but Stevie’s sorrow at her aunt’s decline and demise is a striking complement.  Perhaps most people are terrified or consoled by the idea of their own extinction but find the prospect or fact of the ending of those they love purely saddening.  Even so, evidence of this in the case of Stevie Smith, who famously described death as ‘the only god who must come when he is called’, is telling.

There’s another powerful aspect to Aunt’s senescence.  As she becomes frail and forgetful, Stevie laments the vanishing of someone who ‘used to be such a brisk, managing person’.  This is true yet other facets of Aunt persist.  While there’s no denying that dementia can effect shocking personality change, it also sometimes seems to remove facets of a person in a way that leaves intact – even intensifies – what those who love them as see as their essential nature.  If that nature is as benign as the Lion Aunt’s, in Mona Washbourne’s wonderful playing of her, the effect is cheering as well as sad.  On her last legs, Aunt enthuses in a childlike way over the lunch of ham salad and junket brought to her on a tray.  Her pleasure in the household meals that she and her niece share – even though it’s Stevie, rather than she, who now prepares them – is undimmed.

The lack of a male presence in Stevie Smith’s upbringing in ‘a house of female habitation’ left an interesting legacy.  With no experience of what she called a ‘father knows best’ regime, Stevie continued to value her independence from men.  Although not a lifelong celibate, she describes herself in the film as ‘more of a friendship girl’.  In Stevie‘s only extended flashback scene, to somewhere in the mid-1930s, we see her with Freddy (Alec McCowen), to whom she was briefly engaged[3].  Wearing a striped blazer, he appears in the doorway of the living room and quips (the only word for it) ‘Anyone for tennis?’  (It seems Stevie got to know him at the local tennis club.)  Alec McCowen doesn’t look or sound like a silly caricature for long.  In his one scene, his dialogue with Jackson develops a terrific rhythm and considerable penetration.  Freddy is less an innocuous twit than an insensitive male chauvinist.  When Stevie says she doesn’t like the idea of marriage because it would make her Freddy’s wife rather than an individual in her own right, he reassures her that ‘it’s the same for any woman’ (a response this viewer found more trenchant than anything in The Assistant, Misbehaviour and Never Rarely Sometimes Always put together).

Given the kind of material it is, Stevie was never going to be a commercial hit but it still seems shameful that its theatrical release was quite so limited.  The film was first screened, on both sides of the Atlantic, in late 1978.  On 19 June 1981, Vincent Canby’s enthusiastic review in the New York Times began as follows:

‘You’d better put on your running shoes if you don’t want to miss the best performance by an actress to be seen in any film released so far this year.  It’s Glenda Jackson in Stevie, Hugh Whitemore’s very good film adaptation of his play about the late Stevie Smith … Stevie opens today at the Thalia on a double bill with Mr Forbush and the Penguins and will close tomorrow. … It’s incredible that this English film, which was made in 1978, has not been released in New York until now, even under these foreshortened circumstances …’

Even so, Stevie didn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated by critics.  The film’s curious release history gave it the unusual distinction of winning and being nominated for acting awards, for Glenda Jackson and Mona Washbourne, for different years, 1978 and 1981.

Other than Emma Louise Fox, who appears briefly as the child Stevie, Jackson, Washbourne, Howard and McCowen are the whole credited cast.  They all deliver nearly perfect screen acting of a particularly theatrical kind.  (It stands comparison with large parts of the film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)  The ‘nearly’ qualification is necessary because of Robert Enders’s lack of film-making experience and/or aptitude.  Although he was working with a triple-Oscar-winning cinematographer in Freddie Young, Enders doesn’t visualise his characters as people in a real location, as distinct from actors on a set.  It’s in this respect that Enders’s candour about the theatrical nature of the script is a limitation:  there are times when an entrance or exit looks not just stagy but mistimed (Trevor Howard’s last exit from the living room after Stevie’s death is one example).  Enders also makes too much use of Patrick Gowers’s music, which, though sensitive, usually feels surplus to requirements.  But these defects are minor beside the film’s virtues.  I’m very glad to have seen it last.

26 May 2020

[1] Except for three years in a children’s convalescent home in Broadstairs, where Stevie went in 1907, after contracting TB.

[2] While I’m on the subject …  In 1969, at the second open Wimbledon, Gonzales, aged forty-one, reached the fourth round for a second time.  That was the year of his first-round match against Charlie Pasarell, which Gonzales won 22–24, 1–6, 16–14, 6–3, 11–9 – the longest Wimbledon singles match in history until the John Isner-Nicolas Mahut marathon of 2010.

[3] McCowen’s character takes his name from Freddy in Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper.  His real-life counterpart was called Eric Armitage.