Seance on a Wet Afternoon

Seance on a Wet Afternoon
by Bryan Forbes

Seance on a Wet Afternoon

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DVD details

Actor: Kim Stanley, Margaret Lacey, Maria Kazan, Marie Burke, Richard Attenborough
Director: Bryan Forbes
Producer: Richard Attenborough
Cinematographer: Gerry Turpin
Producer: Bryan Forbes
Writer: Bryan Forbes
Editor: Derek York
Producer: Jack Rix
Writer: Mark McShane
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-09-24
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Homevision

DVD Reviews of Seance on a Wet Afternoon

DVD Review: Great moody and tragic film; poor audio
Summary: 4 Stars

The director does a fine job here with mood, atmosphere, angles, and lighting in this tragic tale of a woman whose mind snaps after a tragedy befalls her and her hapless husband. They hatch a plot to hold a child for ransom to get enough money to get away from the misery and sorrow, but of course the whole thing goes terribly wrong. It's obvious from the beginning that this woman, Myra, is mentally unstable and that she also exerts powerful control over her husband, Billy. Stanley and Attenborough give excellent performances.

The only problem is that I had to turn the audio all the way up to 70 sometimes, practically the maximum, and still could not make out everything that they were saying, especially during the key scene towards the end when Myra gives a seance with police officers at the table.

DVD Review: Genuinely Unsettling
Summary: 5 Stars

A deranged psychic (Kim Stanley) compels her spineless husband (Richard Attenborough) to kidnap the child of a wealthy couple, so that they can collect the ransom money for her return and garner recognition for her services when she conjures the details of the child's location and condition. Despite their sound and ably executed plan, the circumstances and consequences of their crime are exacerbated by greed, ambition and madness.

Bryan Forbes' adaptation of Mark McShane's cult novella possesses an understated power. In perhaps the best of her few feature film roles, Stanley is wholly absorbing and entirely credible as the twisted medium; her performance is imbued with such subtlety that she singlehandedly sustains the story's more ambiguous elements. Though his role requires a less nuanced delivery, the always reliable Attenborough (who co-produced this picture) is equally impressive as her weak-willed, resentful husband. The supporting cast is also quite fine; in particular, Patrick Magee brings a sly, commanding presence to the film as a cunning police superintendent.

Too few crime dramas defy the conventions of the genre, and this is one of the best and most unusual known to me. Elegantly shot and superbly acted, this is film making at its very best: heart-wrenching, unbearably suspenseful and ultimately, quietly chilling.

Home Vision's DVD edition of this remarkable picture is adequate, if unexciting. Although the print is only fair (some scenes sport wear lines) the transfer is exceptional, resulting in as sharp a picture as the format can facilitate. However, the sound mix is far too quiet; whatever your equipment is, you'll probably need to crank up the volume to hear all of the dialogue. The disc's feature set is as sparse as one could expect it to be: only the film itself and two lists of titled scene selections. I'd rather this than a bloated and tasteless presentation.

DVD Review: Underseen Classic
Summary: 5 Stars

This is perhaps the best film of its type, a low-key classic too few have seen.

Kim Stanley (who tends to remind me of her pal, Geraldine Page) gives a bravura and highly-textured performance here as a psychic medium, who may or may not have legitimate powers but elects to go about publicly proving them by deceitful methods by having her husband kidnap a little girl from a prominent London family, hold her captive, and then "find" her.

This is an acting tour de force as well as a fab mood-piece, with an appropriately eerie score by John Barry, the film and London itself wrapped in an unnerving Cold War chill.

DVD Review: GHOULIES,GOBLINS FROM LAST HALLOWEEN! SEND US A MESSAGE WITH YOUR TAMBORINE!
Summary: 4 Stars

Stanley(No! Not Paul) and Attenborough are magnificent
in this downbeat psychological THRILLER! Stanley(Lick it
up! Lick it up.AGHHH AGHH AGHH C'MON,C'MON..NO Clint! Not
that Stanley!) is a fraud medium who arranges for husband
Attenborough to kidnap a wealthy couple's young daughter
so that she can later use her psychic "power' to find her.
Things go TERRIBLY wrong,however,when the child dies and
hubby wants out of his wife's schemes. A beautifully maintained
air of tension and suspicion,great photography,fantastic acting
all add up to make this one of the top THRILLER'S of the 60's.
Lovers of H.G.LEWIS and UMBERTO LENZI look elsewhere. But
lovers of Rosemary's Baby - Don't Look Now and The Vanishing(88)
this may be your cup of blood!

DVD Review: Compelling.
Summary: 4 Stars

S?ance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes, 1964)

Bryan Forbes' name may be on the marquee, but in retrospect, it is the style of producer and star Richard Attenborough that is writ large over this film. Presaging Attenborough's magnum opus, Magic, S?ance on a Wet Afternoon travels down a lot of the same roads-- perhaps with not as much satisfaction, but as effectively in places.

Attenborough plays Philip Savage, the henpecked but well-meaning husband of Myra (Kim Stanley), who desperately wants to believe she's a medium. She is having difficulty overcoming the death of their son Arthur, whom Myra is convinced is speaking to her from beyond the grave. In order to prove herself-- make a name for herself, as it were, in the world of the mundane-- Myra hatches a nefarious plot into which she draws her husband-- kidnapping a child, then approaching the family as someone with helpful information about their missing daughter.

Watching this film over forty years after its initial release, it's easy to see how much influence it's had over the years; its particular plot twists have found their way into films ranging from Attenborough's own later works to wonderful (and, I'm sure, not-so-wonderful) films from around the world. (Certain scenes should especially put you in mind of Hideo Nakata's finest film, Chaos, for example.) While S?ance on a Wet Afternoon never reaches the cinematic heights to be found when Attenborough got behind the camera himself-- the film even devolves to melodrama now and then-- it's still quite a satisfying little journey into the world of psychological suspense. The DVD suffers from a relatively nasty version of the same sound-mastering problem that plagues most DVDs (the soundtrack is mixed much louder than the dialogue track), but that shouldn't stop you from giving it a spin; you'll just find yourself using your remote's volume control a good deal more than usual. *** ?

Description of Seance on a Wet Afternoon

Fraught with the kind of tension that makes breathing difficult, this frighteningly eerie story of a middle-aged couple unable to cope with the loss of their own child has won numerous awards and is now available for the first time on DVD. Myra (Kim Stanley, The Right Stuff) is a mentally unstable medium that believes if she kidnaps a child of wealthy parents, she can prove her psychic abilities by 'finding' the child. Award-winning performances from Stanley as the disturbed Myra and Richard Attenborough (Jurassic Park) as Billy the meek, apologetic husband combine with tension packed location shooting to make this mid-sixties thriller an enduring portrait of madness.

Aside from boasting one of the great evocative titles in film history, S?ance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) works up a surplus of dread with a minimum of devices. Kim Stanley was nominated for an Oscar^? for her performance as a London medium who bulldozes her weak husband (Richard Attenborough) into kidnapping a little girl; the goal is not ransom money, but a chance to prove Stanley's clairvoyant gifts to the police, and thus bring her the respect she has always deserved. The suspense is keen, yet the movie's real achievement is detailing the stifling marriage between two deluded, dependent middle-aged people. Attenborough is heartbreaking as a human doormat, and Stanley's Method intensity brings the movie into a genuinely unnerving realm (she didn't work in movies again for nearly two decades). The story was remade, with intriguing changes, by Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa as S?ance (a.k.a. Korei, 2000). --Robert Horton

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