After working for many years as an actor and screenwriter, Bryan Forbes had a very good start as director in the early 60s, making films as "The L-Shaped Room", "Séance on a Wet Afternoon", "King Rat" and "The Wrong Box", and producing "The Angry Silence". The last great title during this winning streak was the marvelously acted and directed drama "The Whisperers", a fascinating character study, a perceptive portrait of old age on the verge of senility, a rousing combination of lonely people, desperate poor persons, violent rogues and a parade of civil servants, all attempting to survive in a kingdom that once was an empire and now is plagued with struggles and confrontations. In the center Edith Evans shines as Margaret Ross, mother of a criminal son and abandoned by a crook of a husband, who hardly survives creating a fantasy world of palaces, riches and nobility titles, listening to voices in her gloomy apartment, and living on welfare. She creates her Margaret with intelligence, an old woman who faces her tribulations with dignity, as she goes through truly humiliating and cruel situations. Forbes and especially John Barry, who wrote the subtle music commentary, avoided sentimentality and tried to paint a realistic drama as much as the medium and the pressures of the industry allowed them. Then Forbes' career took an unfortunate turn towards big (and too facile) commercial projects, with only a couple of later good efforts as "The Raging Moon" and most notably the controversial first version of "The Stepford Wives", after he made the highly recommended "The Whisperers".
Review of The Whisperers
