The Whisperers **** (1967, Edith Evans, Eric Portman, Nanette Newman, Ronald Fraser) – Classic Movie Review 2423

Writer-director Bryan Forbes’s sterling 1967 drama The Whisperers showcases Edith Evans’s extraordinary tour-de-force performance as a neglected English working-class old woman haunted by voices and troubled by her rotten criminal son Charlie (Ronald Fraser) and ne’er-do-well husband Archie (Eric Portman), who deserted her decades ago.

It deservedly won her the 1968 BAFTA Award for Best British Actress, the Silver Bear for Best Actress award at the 17th Berlin International Film Festival in 1967, the National Board of Review award, the New York Film Critics Circle award, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Drama, all awards for for Best Actress. She narrowly missed winning an Oscar too, after being nominated as Best Actress.

The whisperers are the creatures the impoverished elderly eccentric Mrs Ross, who is living in a ground floor flat and is dependent on welfare, imagines in her paranoid fantasies.

Her son Charlie turns up and hides a package containing a large sum of stolen money in an unused bedroom. Mrs Ross finds it, thinks that it is her windfall and makes plans for it that she confides to a friendly-seeming stranger, who kidnaps her for the money.

Based on the 1961 novel by Robert Nicolson, director Forbes’s screenplay bravely eschews easy box-office appeal and goes for more of an art movie, and indeed the film flopped in the cinema.

Despite, or rather because of, the perfectly restrained handling, the acting is admirable and Dame Edith’s performance is so moving that it is likely to bring on tears to many viewers’ eyes. The Whisperers is a technically polished piece of work, with striking black and white cinematography by Gerry Turpin that seems to belong to an earlier era of British social realist film-making, and another ear-catching score by John Barry. Unusually, the film was mostly edited to Barry’s already written and recorded music, which Forbes used to help inspire him, with a few final adjustments by Barry.

Also in the fine Sixties cast are Forbes’s wife Nanette Newman, Gerald Sim, Margaret Tyzack, Robin Bailey, Harry Baird, Avis Bunnage, John Orchard, Peter Thompson, Michael Robbins, Leonard Rossiter and Kenneth Griffith. Sarah Forbes plays Mrs Ross when she was young. Forbes also cast Portman in his 1968 thriller Deadfall.

The Whisperers was mainly shot on location in the Lancashire town of Oldham, a once-thriving textile centre near Manchester that by 1967 had fallen into decline. The fictional setting of the film however is not named.

Mrs Ross was originally Scottish but Dame Edith said to Bryan Forbes there was no way she could do a working-class Glaswegian accent, so it was set in an unnamed English town.

One of the most important and well loved figures in the British film industry, Bryan Forbes died on 8 May 2013 aged 86. Brilliantly talented as a writer, producer and director, he also had a warm heart and a keen sense of humour. 

RIP Bryan Forbes.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2423

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