Screen:

...Her poetry is in-dwelling, and like Dickinson's, it is inevitably obsessed with the one experience in which everyone is as lonely as an eccentric spinster - death...

...and aside from a clerical job that for many years took her into the city every day, her only outings were to readings of her own poetry, the occasional cocktail party for the literati, and, once, to visit with the queen, who was awarding her the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry that year...

...It creates a reverberation between screen and stage, a resonance, that gives Stevie unexpected depth...

...We recognize the poetry as poetry, yet-accept it as a language that came naturally to this woman...

...This approach enlarges the movie to make room for its subject's poems...

...They become inseparable from her life...

...But at least in Stevie, he shows that when he uses this term, he knows whereof he speaks...

...It is a quality that Glenda Jackson's performance projects with flawless ease...

...Seven years ago, he and Jackson formed a production company that has done movie adaptations of two other stage plays in which she starred...

...Despite this reclusive, not to say dull, existence, Stevie was, like Dickinson, a woman of brilliant, passionate, often audacious imagination...

...Stevie isn't the first one he's made...

...Nothing could seem less likely to succeed in today's market than this obscure English film about an obscure English poet, and indeed, Stevie has had a great deal of trouble...

...Addressing the audience is only one of a number of highly theatrical techniques that Stevie uses with great success...

...The stage is of course the right place for poetry...

...In fact, he might have felt that they were just beginning...

...And since the movie definitely is worth the bother, I want to get you into the right frame of mind to be receptive to it...

...What is surprising is how compelling theatricality becomes in this film...

...The stage techniques make us see the movie as a deliberate artifice, like a poem - a reality that requires a certain level of formal composition to sustain itself...

...It's ridiculous...

...In Stevie Smith's poetry, the erotic energy of life pours into the meditations on death...

...To auntie's dismay, Stevie backed out of her engagement to the only suitor she ever had (Alec McCowen...

...By imposing a number of theatrical conventions on a movie, Stevie manages to strike just the right balance between the two...

...Amazingly, his words did not fall on deaf ears...

...It's used as a rule by people who think that movies have no inherent "quality" of their own - that they have to import it always from some other medium...

...He was only able to do so in the end because Stevie, being a modest project, had a very modest budget...

...The commitment is obviously sin cere...

...Besides her poetry, the one surface sign that Stevie's life wasn't as placid and ordinary as it appeared was that she tried to slit her wrists...

...Actually, $500,000, which was its entire production cost, is not "modest'' by current standards...

...This meant that despite Stevie's having been financed by an American company, First Artists, it had no way to reach American audiences...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...The state of being reflected in both her poetry and Dickinson's is not loneliness so much as solitude, which requires moral courage where loneliness is merely self-pitying...

...To be honest, I suspect that the film succeeds better in this than the play did...

...The paradox, of Stevie is that by being theatrical, it gets across how intensely personal Stevie Smith's poetry was...

...Others include restricting the film almost entirely to a single two-room set - the parlor and kitchen of Stevie's semi-detached house - and relying upon a dazzling virtuoso performance by Ms...

...It's so little money, the film could have been financed out of the budget for coffee breaks on most Hollywood movies...

...What movies offer, in place of the enormous presence that live acting brings to a role in a theater, is immediacy and intimacy...

...The reason lies in the material from which Stevie has been made...

...Even the most private, conversational modern verse is still a formal language better suited to the rigors of the stage than to movies, which are by nature a casual, less structured medium...

...I'm not accustomed to addressing you directly this way, but it seems appropriate just this once because it's one of the things that Stevie herself (Glenda Jackson) does in the movie...

...Her voice was filled not with loneliness, but with a certain self-sufficiency and calm that male poets never seem to achieve...

...Stevie Smith, who died in 1971, was a kind of English Emily Dickinson...

...It all goes to show that good sometimes does come out of evil...

...As a consequence, Glenda Jackson is able to weave excerpts from Stevie Smith's poems seamlessly into the dialogues and monologues of her performance...

...I must admit that when I hear the term "quality film," I invariably wince...

...The theatricality of the film is not surprising since it's based on a play by Hugh Whitemore that he himself adapted to the screen and in which Jackson starred originally on the London stage...

...The result is very moving...

...Among three unlikely musketeers who came to Stevie's rescue was the redoubtable New York Times film critic, Vincent Canby...

...Jackson, who is on screen for all but a few of the film's 102 minutes...

...After opening in Los Angeles to some good reviews in 1978, it closed again for lack of public response, and then languished undistributed for three years...

...For now that he had the film, he also had no money left to advertise it...

...In a recent interview occasioned by the film's new found popularity - it has now opened at a second theater in New York - Robert Enders spoke of his commitment to go on making "quality films...

...It lies in Stevie Smith's life and personality, and in the poetry she wrote that is incorporated into the film...

...A stagey look is usually the limitation of a movie adapted from a successful play...

...It's one thing to be rather chipper and sassy in the face of simple boredom, quite another thing to be that way in facing up to death...

...A spinster who lived in the drab London suburb of Palmer's Green with her "Lion Aunt," as Stevie called her - Mona Washbourne re-creates beautifully the role she played opposite Jackson on the stage - Smith led a rather sheltered life to say the least...

...When Stevie got a two-day New York premiere early in the summer at the Thalia theater, Manhattan's oldest repertory movie house and one of the few that still does its own programing instead of buying pre-packaged classics, Canby saw the film and liked it enough to plead its cause in his review...

...In this case, the limitation is turned into an achievement...

...First its director-producer, Robert Enders, had difficulty even raising the money to make the film...

...Once Enders got his film in the can, though - on a seventeen-day shooting schedule - his troubles still weren't over...

...Movies have a more complete illusion of entering someone's private life the way they can enter the private space of a character's home...

...By now, dear reader, you must be wondering whether I think this film is worth all the bother that's been taken over it...

...The owner of the 68th Street Playhouse, where Le Cage aux Folles had played for years, decided to put one of the piles of money he'd made out of that film into opening Stevie...

...Enders may be someone who thinks that way himself...