Bryan Forbes (1967)
Pauline Kael in her review of Bryan Forbes’s The Raging Moon (1971) wrote as follows:
‘Forbes … has been quoted as saying, “In the last analysis, performance is everything.” Well, it isn’t, you know. His concentration on performance, though not the most exciting way to approach moviemaking, could be an acceptable way if the performers had good roles and could take off in them, but when the role is pasteboard, how much can a performer do? … [He] subordinates everything to a certain kind of performance – the pseudo-serious performance. The background roles are, as usual, the ones that expose Forbes’ limitations … [he] keeps cutting to the sort of fixated glimpses that are meant to tell you “everything” about the minor characters – shots of people being complacent or being sympathetic. One quality at a time. …’
Although there’s more to Whistle Down the Wind and Séance on a Wet Afternoon than the excellent performances, Kael is essentially right and I couldn’t help being reminded of the above watching The Whisperers. It’s sad that Forbes, with his belief in the primacy of performance, directs most of his cast here to act so badly. In most respects, it’s a poor film but in one respect – the one which mattered most to Forbes – it’s a film of great distinction. Pauline Kael thought so too.
Maggie Ross is a pensioner, living alone and lonely and with no help but the National Assistance Board[1] in an unspecified town in the North of England. (The sense that the place has seen better days suggests perhaps a mill town.) The glory of Edith Evans’ portrait of Maggie is that it’s satisfying – to put it mildly – on every level. We watch Maggie going about her routine business. She goes to the police station to report her latest paranoid fantasy about ‘the whisperers’ in the house where she has a poky, dingy flat. She spends time in the local reference library in which the elderly assemble to read newspapers desultorily and get warm purposefully. She takes part enthusiastically in a service in the local mission church. It’s obvious from Bryan Forbes’s deliberate direction that most of the people in the mission sequences are real people; it’s a testimony to Edith Evans’ brilliance that she blends into this quasi-documentary setting as effortlessly as she draws us into the scenes of Maggie in solitude. The brilliance of her acting and the realness of the individual she creates are seamless. You experience this double impact time after time (to give just one small but lovely example, in the way Evans says ‘Maggie Ross’ when a psychiatrist asks the old woman to speak her full name). Edith Evans’s notorious imperiousness is extremely affecting here because it’s offset against Maggie’s vulnerability – poignantly funny too because Maggie is very well spoken, seemingly is someone who’s known comfort and affluence. She could be any poor, elderly woman of this place and time – making tea, negotiating a short flight of steps near her home with difficulty – yet she’s entirely individual. Maggie’s sense of loss, as she returns, after a spell in hospital, to a flat that’s been tidied and emptied of much of its paraphernalia, is beautifully understated. When she reminisces, piercingly, about her lost youth, it’s a mystery why Bryan Forbes thinks that Evans needs the visual aid of a flashback to her girlhood self (played by Forbes’s daughter Sarah).
Edith Evans made three films in 1915-16 and her next, Thorold Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades, in 1949. In the same year, she was in The Women of Dolwyn, followed by The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). She played Ma Tanner in Look Back in Anger (1959) and, between then and her death in 1976, she did fifteen more films – compared with the six screen appearances between 1915 and 1958. The trajectory of her cinema career is comparable to John Gielgud’s (although he ended up making very many more pictures) but, more interestingly, to that of a non-contemporary, Judi Dench. Like Dench, Evans was a legendary stage actress when she started making films regularly and, like Dench, she’s a great, intuitive film actress. It’s outrageous that her phenomenal performance in The Whisperers isn’t, according to Amazon, available on DVD or VHS. (I was able to see the film thanks to some enterprising person who’d posted it on YouTube from a TCM recording.)
Bryan Forbes sets things up neatly but unexcitingly. During the opening credits, accompanied by John Barry’s supple, delicate score, there are shots of the glum, narrow streets of Maggie’s neighbourhood, mostly empty except for a succession of dogs and cats wandering about them – waifs and strays. Once or twice, we hear kids in these streets chanting rhymes, a clichéd ‘poetic’ evocation of working-class culture. Inside Maggie’s flat, there are rows of empty milk bottles lined up on the table and, we soon discover, newspapers stockpiled in the back room: symbols of, respectively, empty orderliness and an unresolved past (as I should know[2]). Maggie thinks she hears voices when the only sound in the place is a melancholy dripping tap. She turns on the wireless to drown out the whisperers and bangs on the ceiling with her broom (would this old lady so be cavalier about bringing down plaster?) to shut up the tenants upstairs. If it’s meant to be socially daring that they’re a white woman and a black man and their baby, the effect is undermined by Forbes’ casting his graceful wife Nanette Newman as the young mother: she’s nearly as classy as Edith Evans. When Maggie’s dodgy son Charlie pays her a rare call to hide a stash of money on the premises, Forbes has Charlie’s face in pointless, grotesque close-up at the chained front door – Ronald Fraser has nailed the character in a couple of lines and keeping the camera on him shows nothing more.
Because Forbes, who also wrote the screenplay (adapted from a 1961 novel by Robert Nicolson), concentrates his sympathy exclusively on Maggie, the socio-political viewpoint he suggests as a consequence is (I assume inadvertently) reactionary. The inveterately unemployed, prostitutes, bookies and the poor (except for Maggie) are presented as, in varying degrees, vicious and/or criminal. Maggie announces at one point that ‘I married beneath me’ and the lowness of the low-lifers among whom she finds herself makes over-emphatically clear that this, at any rate, isn’t a figment of her imagination. Psychiatrists and bureaucrats (with one exception) don’t fare much better: minor characters like the library gauleiter who glares at the OAPs and jolts them awake when they’re drowsing over the papers, or the slimy NAB officials played by Kenneth Griffith and Leonard Rossiter, are hideously overdone. There are occasional sequences that are so garish that you wonder momentarily if these too are part of Maggie Ross’s fantasy life. (One example is the first scene in the mission, with one of the workers there exhorting the congregation to buck up their praying if they want a bowl of soup.)
The local people speak in an unlikely variety of regional working-class accents. There are some decent contributions from the supporting cast but the characters are so badly designed that the actors don’t achieve the fruits of their labours. Gerald Sim gives a well-judged performance as the one sympathetic National Assistance Board man: it’s touching initially that Mr Conway justifies Maggie Ross’s high opinion of him (as a true and rare gentleman – she signs correspondence to him in the name of the Duchess of Argyll). Forbes ruins the effect by having Conway’s solicitousness extend to improbable lengths, leading to a ludicrous exchange between him and the psychiatrist (Robin Bailey) who treats Maggie. The latter explains with vile self-satisfaction that he’s stripping away the delusional layers of her personality. (‘That must be very rewarding,’ snaps Conway sarcastically, ‘telling people they’re nobody and they’re nothing’.) Avis Bunnage’s blunt bulkiness makes her physically convincing as Mrs Noonan, the nasty piece of work who gets Maggie drunk and steals from her. (Maggie loftily informs Mrs Noonan, as they wait in the NAB queue, that her ships have come in: literally: she imagines she owns a fleet of oil tankers.) But the role is so crudely conceived that you find yourself recoiling from Bunnage’s vividness in it. Given Forbes’s tidiness as a director, there are a couple of what seem to be baffling botches in scenes involving Sim and Bunnage. The psychiatrist asks Conway if he smokes and, when the latter answers, ‘Yes – thank you’, replies, ‘I’m afraid I can’t offer you one’. So why ask? Mrs Noonan tempts Maggie into the pub with the lure of a glass of port and sausage and mustard. Maggie still has her wits about her enough to ask where the food’s got to and we’re made to think – by the way Forbes has Avis Bunnage react – that Mrs Noonan is so eager to intoxicate the old lady that she’s forgotten about the solid part of the menu. Then the barman immediately produces the sausages, so they must have been ordered, after all …
The Whisperers falters badly in its second half. Because, until then, Maggie is in nearly every frame and because Edith Evans is so compelling, we immediately feel her absence once the old woman is out of the picture – in hospital with pneumonia, then undergoing psychiatric treatment. It’s at this point that Maggie’s long-absent husband Archie returns. Eric Portman, when we first see him in a collar and tie, has a convincing seedy handsomeness but the character is so obviously written that Portman’s performance pays diminishing returns pretty quickly. The film verges on the ridiculous at a later point when its attention turns to Archie’s involvement in an armed robbery that allows him to take off with the loot and reflect, in the washroom of a train on which he’s making his getaway, ‘Poor old bitch: back on your own again’. If this is bad news for Maggie, it’s good news for the audience: we get Edith Evans back at the centre of the story. At the end of the film – after her short-lived riches (from the stolen goods Charlie deposits in the flat) and Archie has come and gone – Maggie Ross reverts to her old routine. She goes from the National Assistance Board office to the mission, on to the reference library, warming her stockinged feet on the pipes, back to her flat where the dripping tap is restored. But the predictable symmetry of the narrative is eclipsed, like all the other shortcomings of The Whisperers. He may not have meant to do it in quite this way but Bryan Forbes proves his own credo to be true here: in the last analysis, Edith Evans’s performance is all that matters.
14 November 2010
[1] According to Wikipedia, the Board was replaced in 1966, the year in which The Whisperers is set, by the Supplementary Benefits Commission.
[2] I wrote a radio play called The Backlog, which was based on this idea and broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Thirty Minute Theatre in 1981 (with an unexpected repeat the following year!)
