| Séance on a Wet Afternoon | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Bryan Forbes |
| Produced by | Richard Attenborough Bryan Forbes |
| Written by | Bryan Forbes Mark McShane |
| Starring | Kim Stanley Richard Attenborough Nanette Newman Mark Eden Patrick Magee Judith Donner |
| Music by | John Barry |
| Cinematography | Gerry Turpin |
| Distributed by | Rank Organisation |
| Release date(s) | 20 June 1964 |
| Running time | 115 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
Séance on a Wet Afternoon is a 1964 British film directed by Bryan Forbes, based on the novel by Mark McShane in which an unstable medium convinces her husband to kidnap a child so she can help the police solve the crime and collect the ransom. The film stars Richard Attenborough (who was also the film's co-producer), Kim Stanley, Nanette Newman, Mark Eden and Patrick Magee.
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Myra Savage (Kim Stanley) is a self-styled medium who holds séances in her dreary home. Her husband Bill (Richard Attenborough), unable to work full-time, for being asthmatic, assists in his wife’s séances. At Myra’s instigation, Bill kidnaps the young daughter (Judith Donner) of a wealthy couple (Mark Eden and Nanette Newman), confining her in a room (in the Savage home) dressed as a hospital ward. Myra dresses as a nurse to deceive her to believing she is hospitalised. However, Myra insists she is "borrowing" the girl to demonstrate her psychomancy to a police investigator (Patrick Magee) in helping him find the missing girl. However, her plan goes awry as her unsteady mental health begins to fray.[1][2]
The haunting music played on the phonograph over and over by Myra and Billie throughout the film, in which the voice of a boy soprano becomes an invisible character reminding them of their dead baby, is from the movement "Oh for the Wings of a Dove" from the choral work "Hear My Prayer" by Felix Mendelssohn.
According to Jon Krampner's biography Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley, Forbes and Attenborough had initially encountered difficulty in casting the role of Myra. Deborah Kerr and Simone Signoret were originally approached for the part, but both actresses turned down the role. Forbes and Attenborough then contacted Kim Stanley, an American theatre and television actress whose previous film work was limited to starring in the 1958 feature The Goddess and providing the uncredited opening and closing narration for the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Attenborough would later be quoted as stating that Stanley was the best choice, noting that the "complexity of dramatic impression vital to the credibility of Myra was hard to find. Also an intellectual ability to follow and understand the character. I didn’t believe Simone (Signoret) could convey, as Kim did, the otherworldliness which this woman inhabited in her private fantasies."[3]
After completing Séance on a Wet Afternoon, Stanley would not appear in another film until Frances in 1982.
Critical reaction in the British and American media was overwhelmingly strong. The London Express called the film "superbly atmospheric" while The Sunday Telegraph dubbed it "compassionate, intelligent and absorbing." The New York Herald Tribune called Séance on a Wet Afternoon "the perfect psychological suspense thriller and a flawless film to boot" while The New York Times stated "it isn’t often you see a melodrama that sends you forth with a lump in your throat, as well as a set of muscles weary from being tense for nigh two hours."[4]
Kim Stanley won the Best Actress Award from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review. She was nominated for the Academy Award as Best Actress (she lost to Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins) and the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress (she lost to Anne Bancroft in The Pumpkin Eater). Richard Attenborough won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor, while Forbes’ screenplay and Gerry Turpin’s cinematography received nominations. Forbes' script won the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award and the 1965 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
Séance on a Wet Afternoon was remade in 2000 as the Japanese language horror film Seance (Japanese: 降霊, Kōrei), directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. An opera of the same name based on the film, created by Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz (Pippin, Godspell, Wicked), had its world premiere on September 26, 2009, at the Granada Theater at Opera Santa Barbara in California.[5]
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