Seance on a Wet Afternoon
by Bryan Forbes
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Kim Stanley, Lionel Gamlin, Margaret Lacey, Maria Kazan, Marie BurkeDirector: Bryan Forbes
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-09-24
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Homevision
Movie Reviews of Seance on a Wet Afternoon
Movie 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.
Summary 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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