Bryan Forbes (1964)
Kim Stanley is a legendary cinema actress largely because, in spite of her success on Broadway and television, she played so few movie roles (as far as I can see from her IMDB entry, she appeared in only six cinema features). Her brilliant portrait of the crazy medium Myra Savage in this picture gives us an idea of what we missed as a result of Stanley’s extreme selectiveness. Richard Attenborough is so much better an actor than he is a director. Here he wears an unnecessary, rather silly prosthetic nose but there’s nothing else silly about his performance as Myra’s powerless husband Billy – it’s superb. Séance on a Wet Afternoon is about Myra’s scheme to kidnap a little girl and, by telling the police where to find her, become a celebrity psychic. I’d seen it two or three times before and remembered it as a film I very much liked. I don’t think I’d realised until this viewing just how good it is – perhaps one of the best British films of the sixties. The story, based on a novel by Mark McShane which Bryan Forbes adapted, may sound floridly melodramatic but the two lead actors, and Forbes’s direction, turn Séance into something gripping.
I’m naturally attracted to the setting – to the sense of what goes on in suburbia behind closed doors and screened windows. The whole production design is right and expressive (the art director was Ray Simm) – not just the Savages’ house but the surrounding area. There’s a patch of waste ground close to what looks like a disused building at a former racecourse or dog track. It’s here that Billy, having abducted the little girl Amanda as she’s leaving school (he tricks her chauffeur and drives off in the family Rolls), awkwardly chloroforms and transfers the child to his motor bike sidecar. The central London location sequences – in and around Leicester Square – are also fascinating to me as a documentary record of time and place. Forbes and his cameraman Gerry Turpin use light obviously but very effectively. It’s nothing as crude as harsh reality intruding on the tenebrous fantasy that pervades the Savages’ house: Myra partakes of sunlight as much as of darkness (‘So bright after a séance – brightness just seems to fall from the air’). The silvery light in the woodland where, near the end of the film, Billy eventually leaves the drugged child so that she’ll be found, safely and quickly by a nearby group of scouts, beautifully strengthens the image’s babe-in-the-wood quality.
When Myra reminds Billy of his ordinariness and her specialness, rattling on about her communication with ‘Arthur’ (who turns out to be the Savages’ only and stillborn child – presumably the trauma that sent Myra over the edge), Richard Attenborough becomes increasingly, defeatedly still: Billy’s heard it all a thousand times before. (The long-playing record that is Myra is complemented by recordings of ‘Hear My Prayer’ and ‘Oh For the Wings of Dove’. She keeps putting them on the turntable and her husband keeps asking her to turn them off.) Billy repeatedly opens his mouth to challenge what she’s saying but Myra speaks rapidly and irresistibly: he always seems to miss the chance to get a word in edgeways. Until, that is, Myra goes too far and tells Billy that Arthur has advised her that Amanda should die too. Billy’s reaction is immediate and the force of it is stunning: his angry resistance begins as a panic measure to thwart Myra’s madness but Attenborough’s outburst develops such momentum that you know you’re hearing what’s been building up inside Billy for years. Attenborough also makes Billy’s miserable self-awareness funny (‘I’m hardly a master criminal’).
Kim Stanley’s engagement with Myra’s psyche is extraordinary – the actress herself seems to be a mind-reader. She makes effortless but wonderfully decisive transitions: Myra is smilingly reasonable, cloyingly childlike one moment; then the hectoring sweetness vanishes and her egomaniac edge points through. Stanley is able to shift physical shape too – from stolid imposingness to gliding insubstantiality and back. John Barry’s score, although perhaps it’s sometimes used over-emphatically, very cleverly describes Myra’s violent mood changes – with its switches from plinking simplicity to keening dissonance (and the melancholy dignity of Barry’s main theme pulls you into the story from the start). Bryan Forbes orchestrates the scenes between Stanley and Attenborough very impressively – their emotional dynamism is excitingly sustained.
Séance isn’t perfect: after he’s collected the ransom money, Billy’s removal of his disguise on a crowded tube is too protracted and conspicuous; and some of the acting in the smaller parts isn’t great. A couple of the people at Myra’s séances, for example, seem to want to make too much of an impression – in sequences whose strength depends on Forbes’s contrasting Myra’s bravura histrionics with the drab respectability of the visitors who turn up to experience the other world as part of a weekly routine. It’s hardly surprising that all the rest of the cast are overshadowed by the leads but there’s something to like in most of the main supporting performances. Nanette Newman, although she’s a limited actress, is lovely and touching as the kidnapped girl’s mother; as her rich industrialist husband, Mark Eden is a bit over the top when he’s begging the voice (Attenborough’s) on the other end of the telephone to tell him his daughter’s safe but excellent when he’s exasperatedly dismissing Myra’s crank overtures. Judith Donner is marvellous as Amanda: this snooty little girl is self-possessed even as a hostage. She never seems to believe that she’s in a room in hospital as the Savages claim (they dress up as masked doctor and nurse to come and give her meals and injections) and that quietly confident scepticism gives Amanda the upper psychological hand. And Forbes achieves something rather brilliant (and amusing) by casting Patrick Magee in the small but crucial part of a police detective who gains Myra’s confidence by telling her he’s the president of his local branch of the Society for Psychical Research. Magee is congenitally much more believable as an SPR adherent than a coolly calculating detective but at this stage the effect of someone sane faking eccentricity – after watching the loco Myra and Billy pretending to the outside world that they’re ordinary people – is oddly bracing. I never expected to say this of Patrick Magee but the rationality of his character comes as a breath of fresh air. Other familiar faces and dependable performers in the Metropolitan Police here include Gerald Sim and Ronald Hines.
Myra and Billy inhabit aberrant lives but their relationship, for all its distortions, is not just a mutually needy but a loving one – Stanley and Attenborough convince you that it is anyway. The Savages are grooved into a febrile, relentless pas de deux and folie à deux. Isolated in the house which Myra inherited from her mother (and which Forbes makes claustrophobic even though it’s large), they rarely see anyone except the cleaning lady (who’s on holiday when they put their plan into action) and the visitors to Myra’s séance. (Billy doesn’t have a job.) The idea of kidnapping the child begins as part of the fantasy world that dominates thanks to Myra’s strength of personality; the idea then turns, startlingly, into something that happens in the real world and has real consequences. The presence of the child in the house, even though it’s the result of crazy abnormality, puts Billy, in his interactions with Amanda, back in touch with feelings of affection and protectiveness – and so on a collision course with Myra. She, who so much wants the world to recognise her gifts that she’s prepared to force that recognition, is also so thoroughly delusional that you know that, if her plan had succeeded, she would have believed it supernaturally ordained. The last sequence of the film, when she goes into a trance and spills the beans to the police, is very affecting: it’s the conclusive proof that, while Myra’s psychomancy may be a fraud, the emotional turbulence of her mind is vividly and wrenchingly genuine.
9 October 2009
