Hinterland

Anyone who thinks Margaret Thatcher brought the north to its knees should watch this 1967 film

The film industry abounds with superlatives, but one that can be used legitimately is that Bryan Forbes was one of the greatest figures of British cinema. A decade after his death, Forbes is best remembered as a director, thanks to his 1975 Hollywood triumph with The Stepford Wives, featuring among others his talented wife, Nanette Newman. But his work at home showed he was a considerable writer, too – not to mention a pretty useful actor, as those who have seen the 1950s masterpieces An Inspector Calls and The Colditz Story will know. It was in 1960, the year before he made his directorial debut with Whistle Down the

Wind, that Forbes wrote what I have long considered his two finest screenplays – one for the comedy crime film The League of Gentlemen; the other for The Angry Silence, a deeply uncomic, highly intelligent assault on militant trades unionism.

Yet it is one of his lesser-known films, The Whisperers – which he adapted himself from the

1961 novel of the same name by Robert Nicolson – that I think displays to the utmost his genius as a director. Released in 1967, it is the profoundly depressing story of an old woman on the edge of dementia, living in a grim flat in a decaying part of the north of England, who is treated abominably by her family and her neighbours and finds compassion only when it is offered to her by the welfare state. It is, however, less a paean to what some regard as socialism’s finest creation than an essay on how the state has replaced the natural institutions of society – notably the family and the local community – to become a substitute for the exercise of normal human feelings and decency.

Forbes was fortunate to be shooting his film during the period when post-industrial ruination was working its way through formerly flourishing 19thcentury factory and mill towns, and much of the cheap-and-nasty council housing and modern industrial units that replaced them were still being built. He shot the film in Oldham, outside Manchester, at a time when it looked rather as though it had just been subjected to a nuclear strike. It is a town of actual and metaphorical wastelands, what is left of its crumbling Victorian infrastructure a testimony to the relative decline of an entire nation. When Forbes released the film, Harold Wilson had been prime minister for three years, but the white heat of the technological revolution was hardly to be seen, and certainly not in Oldham.

Those who believe Thatcherism brought the industrial north to its knees should watch this film.

The film is carried by Edith Evans, playing Mrs Ross, a character as far from her Lady Bracknell caricature as can be imagined. She is dependent on social security – National Assistance as it was then known – and her benefits officer, Mr Conrad, played by Gerald Sim, is the one person who is kind to her. Her husband (sublimely portrayed by Eric Portman, one of the great actors of the 1940s, playing against his usual clipped, inscrutable type) is a spiv who has deserted her and

In The Whisperers, Oldham looks as if it has been subjected to a nuclear strike

now lives in a hostel for derelicts.

Her son Charlie (Ronald Fraser) is an unsuccessful criminal who visits her only when he wants something, which in the film is to stash some money he has stolen. His mother finds it and thinks it is intended for her: but a particularly vile woman spots she has it, lures her back to her new council estate, fills her with drink and robs her. She is then dumped, insensible, in an alley, nearly dies of pneumonia, then is restored to health by sympathetic doctors and nurses. Her husband is forced by a National Assistance agent to return to her, which he does reluctantly, before swindling a bookmaker, and fleeing before the bookie’s heavies can catch up with him. His wife, alone once more, sits talking to her empty room, while the wrecking balls move in.

Not all the old industrial landscape was swept away in Oldham: some of its Victorian heritage remains, while, perhaps predictably, the 1950s council estate where Mrs Ross’s abductor lives has been demolished. For all its grimness, The Whisperers is a stunning film, a memorial to a moment of decline, but also to its immensely gifted writer and director.