TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Edgar Soberon Torchia 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".

webster7-636-375461 This movie was indeed well-acted, but I found it too slow moving and depressing to possibly recommend to anyone other than acting students. It just didn't hold my interest. I wasn't compelled to care about what happened to the main character. It's a carefully crafted view of an old woman's life. Realistic in her perspective as well as the perspective of others with whom she interacts. It's interesting that a review must be at least 10 lines in order to be accepted as a legitimate review. So much for focusing on brevity and quality of content rather than quantity of text. Seems quite silly actually.

mukava991 This grim tale about the loneliness and vulnerability of old age, set in what must be the most rundown section of Manchester, manages to touch us in an unsentimental manner. Its chief quality is the crisply photographed slum in which it largely takes place, like the last remains of the 19th century surviving into the post-War 20th. The protagonist, Margaret Ross, played by the stately Edith Evans, lives in a cluttered ground floor flat in this urban wasteland of rain-slicked cobblestone streets without cars or pedestrians, but an abundance of crumbling brick walls, gutted buildings and stray cats. The opening credit sequence of grey rooftops under rainy skies is particularly striking.At home she looks through newspapers, eats bread with honey, sips tea and listens to radio as her sink faucet drips, drips, drips. She constantly hears voices (the "whisperers" of the title) and turns up the radio to drown them out. When the upstairs neighbors, an interracial couple with an infant, pound on the floor in protest, she pounds back on the ceiling with a broomstick and is showered with bits of plaster. (We see the bald patch from where the plaster has fallen but the absence of other patches means that she has never before banged on the ceiling; this strand of the story would have been more convincing if more of the ceiling was similarly defaced.) When not talking to the imagined voices, she spends her solitary life visiting the library where she surreptitiously warms her feet on the heating pipes, collecting welfare from a local government office where she makes frequent references to her good breeding and high-class family connections, listening to sermons at a local evangelical storefront chapel, and tending to household chores which seem to consist mostly of emptying large quantities of dust, coal ashes and bottles and cans from which she derives most of her nourishment.Evans brings dignity to the role but somehow she does not seem to be the right actress for the part. Margaret Ross is a woman of humble origins. Evans is a thoroughbred. True, she does claim that she married beneath herself, but that would be putting it mildly. Still, she has the acting skills to keep us entertained, and she gets brilliant support from the secondary players: Eric Portman as her surly husband, Avis Bunnage as a predatory welfare mom and Gerald Sim as a welfare clerk add a great deal to the overall presentation. Leonard Rossiter, too, shows up for a strong few minutes as a government official. And John Barry supplies a melancholy but unobtrusive musical score.Evans got an Oscar nomination for this performance. Fair enough. But I think Gerry Turpin should have also gotten one for his beautiful cinematography.

sol- There are many good qualities in this study of paranoia, loneliness, ageing and exploitation, among other themes, with its virtues ranging from a great mood setting score by John Barry, to excellent camera angles and aptly stark sets, all of which fit in with the general atmosphere of the film. In an Oscar nominated role, Edith Evans also gives off a fine performance, and there is some good work with extended dissolves to edit between different shots. It is not an easy film to like and admire in spite of its virtues though. There are excesses of melodrama thrown in, such as cops and robbers, and these subplots serve to distract from the protagonist. The lack of dialogue at times is distracting in itself too, and there are also odd characters in small segments thrown in here and there that do nothing at all. The dual spoken narration is also rather awkward. Yes, there are some things that can be complained about here - one could also complain that the nastiness is excessive. There is still a lot that makes this a good film however, and these virtues definitely show through. It is an excellent film, but it may not satisfy all tastes. Bryan Forbes is a great director, and almost all his films are worth a look if one is interested in good directing regardless of the plot or characters.