Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

Admirable film.

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The title of this film is a bit baffling. Two séances play an important part in the plot, but neither takes place on a wet afternoon. One takes place in the evening, the other on an obviously fine day. Perhaps its significance is clearer in the original novel, which I have never read.Billy and Myra Savage, a middle-aged, middle-class suburban couple, kidnap Amanda, the young daughter of a wealthy businessman. Although they send her father a ransom note, their motive is not financial. Even though Billy is unable to work because of ill health, they live in a large, imposing Victorian house and are clearly not short of money. Rather Myra, a medium who holds séances in her home, believes that she can become famous for her supposed psychic abilities by helping the police to solve the crime.When I first saw this film many years ago I disliked it for what I saw as a lack of realism. How on earth did Billy and Myra imagine that they were going to get away with a plan so obviously badly conceived and badly executed? Looking back, I can see that my criticism was unfair and that I had been unduly influenced by films in which a gang of master- criminals put together an intricate, seemingly foolproof, scheme only to come unstuck because of some minor detail, of the tenacity or brilliance of the investigating detective, or of sheer bad luck. Because the truth is that Billy and Myra are not brilliant master- criminals. Far from it. She is mentally unstable and detached from reality to the extent that she hardly realises that she is committing a crime. She insists that she is merely "borrowing" Amanda, not kidnapping her. She believes that she is in touch with the spirit of her son Arthur, who died at birth, but fails to realise that she does not actually have any psychic abilities. If she did, she would not have to go through such a ridiculous charade in order to "demonstrate" them. As for her husband, he is merely a weak and cowardly little man unable to stand up to his domineering wife, although at the end he does display a greater humanity than she is capable of.This is the only film in which I have ever seen Kim Stanley. She was, apparently, a theatre and television actress who had only appeared in one previous feature film, "The Goddess", and was only the third choice for the role of Myra, Deborah Kerr and Simone Signoret having turned it down. Yet she is excellent here, showing us the way in which her self- deluded character's personality disintegrates bit by bit to the point where she can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality and can see no objection to killing Amanda. Richard Attenborough, the film's co- producer and her co-star, paid tribute to her "complexity of dramatic impression". She received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress (losing to Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins) but this did not persuade her to make a career in films. It was to be another eighteen years before she appeared in another film, "Frances". (She was Oscar nominated for that as well). Attenborough is also very good as the cowed Billy.This was the third film directed by Bryan Forbes, who had made such a brilliant start to his directing career with "Whistle Down the Wind", one of the great classics of the British cinema; his wife Nanette Newman appears as Amanda's mother. Like Forbes's two earlier films (his second was "The L-Shaped Room"), this one is in black-and-white, something still regularly used in Britain (unlike America) during the mid-sixties, probably because colour television had not yet come to Britain. I was reminded of some of the early works of Alfred Hitchcock, especially "Shadow of a Doubt", another psychological thriller about a young girl in danger and which takes place in a seemingly tranquil suburb. "Séance on a Wet Afternoon" doesn't have quite the same emotional impact as something like "Whistle Down the Wind", largely because the two leading characters are so unsympathetic. It is, however, a taut and engrossing psychological drama.

Two magnificent actors, Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough star in "Seance on a Wet Afternoon," a 1964 film directed by Brian Forbes. Stanley was one of the truly great stage and film actresses of the last century; unfortunately, her film performances are very rare.Here Stanley plays Myra Savage, a woman who probably believes that she is a true psychic and communicating with her late son. Her late son tells her that in order to gain a big reputation, she needs to kidnap the child of a wealthy family, collect the ransom, and then psychically come up with the location of the child and the money.Myra doesn't do much - instead, she sends her weak, cowed husband Billy (Attenborough) to do the kidnapping. They make one room in the house look like a hospital room and, wearing surgical masks, they tell the child she's sick and in hospital. The whole thing starts to make Billy extremely nervous, as he realizes that his delusional wife, whom he's been jollying along all these years, is in fact nuts.Brilliant performances by Stanley and Attenborough, Stanley capturing the manipulative nature of Myra as well as her delusions, and Attenborough simply amazing as a weak-willed milksop who seems willing to do anything to avoid a confrontation with Myra.Though this is a somewhat slow film but extremely atmospheric and suspenseful. This is not only due to Forbes' direction, but is also driven in part by Stanley's portrayal of the unstable Myra. You never know what she's going to do next, but you can guess - and it scares you.Excellent film.

The DVD release has an 'extra' in the shape of Bryan Forbes talking about the film in the course of which he takes full credit for 'inventing' the child that died at birth - a revelation withheld until the closing stages; until then Kim Stanley has given the impression that it lived for some years. This raises the interesting speculation that Edward Albee 'stole' this from Forbes for his own highly successful play (which has been revived consistently, unlike Seance) Who's Afraid Of Viginia Woolf, in which, again, a dead male child is referred to throughout the three acts by 'parents' George and Martha until George (again it is the husband that forces the wife to accept the truth) reveals that the child never in fact existed and was a fantasy. Virginia Woolf opened on Broadway in October, 1962, and played in London at the Piccadilly Theatre the following year whilst Seance was released in 1964. In a line from the screenplay the leading lady says '... brightness falls from the air ...'. In 1941 Nigel Balchin published a very fine novel set during the Blitz and entitled Darkness Falls From The Air. Bryan Forbes owned a bookshop for many years in Virginia Water. As for the film itself, seen in 2008, it's fairly ho hum though doubtless finding its audience at the time, never one to be afraid of nepotism Forbes again cast his wife, Nanette Newman, and Richard Attenborough's brother-in-law, Gerald Sim, in supporting roles. Kim Stanley has the flashier role and acquits herself well whilst Dickie tends to phone it in. Interesting as a curio.

A psychotic psychic and her meek husband kidnap the daughter of a wealthy family in an elaborate plan to generate publicity for her séance business. Stanley creates an interesting character, but her background as a stage actress is evident in fits of over-emoting. Attenborough is likable as her weak-willed husband. The small roles are well acted. The film takes too long establishing the relationship between Stanley and Attenborough. Forbes creates a creepy atmosphere in the old mansion in which the couple resides, but is letdown by an uneven script. Some of the plot elements are highly implausible and the conclusion is rather abrupt and unsatisfying.