Among the Cobwebs

The Whisperers. Rattling around her scruffy flat, a penurious, retired domestic (Dame Edith Evans) lives a life of utter solitude in an atmosphere where the dripping of a faucet is a dramatic event. Her only companions are "the whisperers," unheard voices who speak in her cobwebbed brain, alternately providing her with companionship and terror. In the gritty industrial town in which she lives, time settles like the soot as she goes about her monotonous routine--a visit to the library to warm her feet on a radiator pipe; a stop at the police station to record the most recent threat by her voices; an interlude at the National Assistance Board for her pitiful dole.

Reviled by her neighbors, she maintains a wintry dignity by creating the fiction that she is a noblewoman temporarily down on her luck, awaiting an inheritance from her father's estate.

Eventually, however, fortune does come her way. Her son, a petty criminal whose visits are years apart, makes a call and secretes a wrapped bundle in a closet. Then he flees, into the arms of the bobbies, and the package lies mouldering in a closet until the old lady comes upon it and rips it open. The sight of the stolen loot drives her nearly mad with joy; in her mind it becomes the nonexistent legacy, testimony to her tale of vanished elegance.

Journeying out with the money in her handbag, she is soon spotted as an easy mark. A predatory woman coaxes her to her home and spikes her drink; the old lady passes out, and her purse is rifled for everything but small change after which she is unceremoniously dumped in an alley. She develops pneumonia; teams of doctors save her life but not her mind. In the shadows of the apartment, the old lady withdraws into herself to bicker with the whisperers, who have settled in to stay.

Writer-Director Bryan Forbes (The Wrong Box) has spared nothing--certainly not the viewer--in his pitiless case history. He spins out his catalogue of age's miseries to somewhat excessive length. But Dame Edith, 79, gives a superb performance that soars above the script. Hobbling on thick ankles that can no longer bear their burden, querulously demanding a pair of new shoes "nicely styled but not too racy," she has created new proof that for great actresses there is still no age limit.

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