Stevie: The Movie

What we are treated to is the somewhat cropped and necessarily compressed dramatic through-line of Stevie's story, her life condensed into a couple of emblematic hours, her fate. Her mother's unsuitable marriage. How her father deserted the family and ran away to sea ("What folly it is that daughters are always supposed to be/ In love with papa. It wasn't the case with me"). How Margaret took her sister, who had a weak heart, and her two sickly nieces, and moved with them into Palmers Green when it was still a lovely rural hamlet, a country village. "I still find it very dreamy and poetical," Stevie says, looking out the window at this suburban site of her childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age . . .

It was Stevie's lot to be sickly. "Fate, I suppose. Stevie's fate," she sings out, half mockingly, half in earnest. "Oh, I believe in fate, I really do."

The film cuts to the blanched light of the past, and the camera slowly closes in on a young girl's face mooning in a single square pane of glass. The other curtains are all closed. She has a look of pained homesickness on her face. She waits there until a nurse comes to pull her away. The sudden whimper of a child's voice somewhere in the background.

The trevor Howard figure appears at momentous turning points, as if he is the exterior voice of Stevie's fate itself. He's there to deliver the dark news, the mournful tone, while in the background John Williams's haunting guitar solos inflect a general mood of ominousness. All through the movie the original music by Patrick Gowers creates an almost subliminal feeling-the unconscious texture -of sadness and melancholy, the mood of fatefulness. The nameless man sits on a park bench on a wintry day He's holding a cane and wearing black gloves. He's there to convey the doomed undercurrent-the fatal music-in Stevie's life and work:

It's like a man playing cards, Stevie said. There's the man himself, and the cards he's playing, and there's another man watching over his shoulder. The player is life, the watcher is the spirit, and the cards are fate. Stevie's fate was unfortunate, to say the least. It was tuberculosis.

Stevie contracted tubercular peritonitis and spent three years on and off in the Yarrow Convalescent Home, Broadstairs, on the Kent Coast. She was precocious about death and claimed that the thought of suicide actually came to her for the first time when she was eight years old. It didn't depress her at all. "The thought cheered me wonderfully," she said. I like the way Jackson lights a cigarette and leans into the story while her aunt obliviously reads the paper. A telling moment. There's a huge part of her inner life that was always a secret from her companion. Jackson catches the stoic black humor in Smith's defining subject, how she often brought an odd brightness to the thought of oblivion.

'Life may be treacherous,' ! remember thinking to myself, 'but you can always rely upon Death.' it also occurred to me that if one can remove oneself from the world at any time, why particularly now? I realized that Death is my servant; he's got to come when I call him . . .