The Whisperers (1966)

This is currently unavailable, but I thought I would review it anyway, because it is a crime and a scandal that it is not on DVD, and maybe someone reads these things who can influence a re-release.

Great moments in movies can derive from many elements: the script, the design, the direction, the acting, the music, the editing or any combination of these.

There is a great movie moment in "The Whisperers", where the impoverished Mrs Ross (Edith Evans) discovers the stolen money her son has hidden in her house. It seems like a gift from God, and the fear, the greed, the hysterical delight, the sense of "naughtiness" as the pensioner is reduced to a giggling little girl is unforgettable. One of the best performances on film, ever.

The fact that Mrs Ross is played by Dame Edith Evans causes some raised eyebrows at the time the film was made. Anyone only familiar with her Grande Dame roles from Lady Bracknell onwards will be astonished at her boldness and her empathy here. For she doesn't act the role, she embodies it completely. Every flicker of thought and emotion is there, physically and mentally. It would be held up as an object lesson in method acting, except it isn't.

One thing that becomes clearer with the passage of time is that, of the "greats" of British theatre born before World War I - Evans, Thorndyke, Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, Redgrave - it is the ones who had the reputation for not really Acting, for always playing themselves, recognisable to the point of self-parody, that have delivered the film performances which will most stand the test of time: Gielgud in "Charge of the Light Brigade" and "Providence", Richardson in "The Four Feathers" and "The Fallen Idol", Evans here all show up the so-called versatility of Olivier for the hollow ham that it was.

Faced with an actress of the stature of Edith Evans here, director properly Bryan Forbes adopts the only course of action to him, and much of the film the camera is simply on its knees in the presence of greatness. Elsewhere the film gets bogged down in a rather sketchy gangland which embraces both Mrs Ross's son (Ronald Fraser) and her errant husband (Eric Porter). The details of the Assistance Board, with its kindly administrator (Gerald Sim) concerned for the health and well-being of his clients and its inspector (Kenneth Griffith) investigating the need for a pair of shoes, seem impossibly quaint and benevolent now, but the film has a fundamental truth and harshness about the isolation and vulnerability of some old people, who are only courted when they can be exploited.

Every week there are stories in the local papers of a pensioner found dead in their flat weeks after they passed away. I always think of Mrs. Ross when I see this.