The Whisperers

Forbes' ambitious but finally unsuccessful adaptation of Robert Nicolson's novel about an old working class woman, abandoned in her impoverished flat, who retreats into paranoid delusions of faded grandeur. Dame Edith Evans gives a spirited performance in the central role, but Forbes' direction is typically over-emphatic and obvious, underlining the social conscience of the film ad nauseam, and even putting its message into the mouth of a social worker (who asks a psychiatrist if the old lady wasn't happier with her illusions than with society's attempts to cure them). Forbes' daughter Sarah appears as the old lady when she was a child.