From the late 1940s to the mid-60s, Kim Stanley was one of the most important actresses in American theater. Her career is the stuff of legend, going through Tony nominations and the Actors Studio at the height of its influence, culminating in a disastrous performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters on the other side of the pond. Forever volatile and insecure, perchance suffering from mental illness or the fragilities of a great diva, Stanley swore never to act on stage again, depriving theatergoers of a goddess whose glory was as bright as it was short-lived. One would think Stanley's departure from theater could have meant more big screen gigs, but she kept herself away from such fare. TV appearances were more to her liking, and she got two Emmy wins for her trouble, including for the ultimate Big Momma in the 1984 TV movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
She'd only count five credits in the movies, one of them voice-only. And still, two of those turns resulted in Oscar nominations, reflecting her talent and reputation among thespians. She was an actors' actor, alright. Today, on her centennial, I invite you to join me on a trip to the past, to Kim Stanley's second and last lead role in a film for which AMPAS nominated her. It's time to remember, mayhap summon, the hauntings of Séance on a Wet Afternoon…
You'll struggle to find Bryan Forbes' name in lists of the great British filmmakers. And yet, during the 1960s, he proved himself a director of unusual talent when it came to actors. Before he crystalized 1970s reactionary anti-feminism in The Stepford Wives or made Cinderella twirl in 18th-century panniers for The Slipper and the Rose, Forbes put his stamp on a series of acting showcases that sprung from the newborn tradition of the kitchen sink drama. There was the acclaimed duet of Hayley Mills and Alan Bates in 1961's Whistle Down the Wind, Leslie Caron's Oscar-nominated turn in 1962's The L-Shaped Room, a 1964 Of Human Bondage remake starring Kim Novak and Laurence Harvey, the star-studded King Rat from 1965, and Edith Evans' tour de force in 1967's The Whisperers.
And in between those projects, we find 1964's Séance on a Wet Afternoon, an adaptation of Marc McShane's homonymous novel about a medium who conspires with her husband to kidnap a child so she can later "solve" the mystery of the kid's disappearance. For the lead role of Myra Savage, Forbes and Richard Attenborough got Kim Stanley to cross the Atlantic, emboldened by her theatric bonafides and belief that she'd be able to do the role justice in ways their first choices, Deborah Kerr and Simone Signoret, could not. Fittingly, the film wastes no time centering all our attention on the actress's commanding presence, introducing us to its world through one of Myra's séances.
The camera first finds hands held along a table's edge, forming a circle the screen delineates as it looks for the woman in touch with the beyond. As it pans up from its patient swirl, it finds Stanley before a flame, communicating with something we can't quite perceive. Or maybe she's just performing an oft-repeated and overtly rehearsed act. But, if it were an exercise in make-believe conmanship, wouldn't she put on more of a show? Stanley's approach to portraying Myra's trance is immediately arresting for its whispered quality, how little she's doing in her stillness, and how much she seems to be conducting the séance for herself rather than the expectant clients. Maybe Myra's not lying. Or she's just delusional.
Stanley will walk a fine line between the possibilities of outward manipulation and inward-looking madness for most of Séance on a Wet Afternoon. Though, it's also possible that this polysemic reading stems more from the actress's mere existence than some deliberate action on her part. The little I've seen of Stanley on screen suggests a woman possessed, often disconnected but never alienating, supremely skilled, yet sometimes moved by impulses and reasonings I can't make sense of or rationalize. Even if insular in their workings, her performances are always fascinating objects, be they triumphs or failures. And make no mistakes, Kim Stanley's Myra Savage is anything but a failure.
If that introduction didn't make that obvious, then the sequence right after sure will. Rather than telegraphing Myra gradually coming to the decision to commit her crime, Forbes drops us in the weeds of the medium's schemes. Billy Savage, played by Richard Attenborough at the top of his game, is already defeated and resigned to do what Myra designs, cowered and unassuming, squashed like a bug under a pane of glass yet not nearly as lively as that might imply. Whether Myra talks to ghosts or not is immaterial, for she has made a phantasm of her spouse while nurturing the memory of another life lost. In that regard, Stanley's unwillingness to play off her screen partner isn't a problem. Instead, it's an organic manifestation of the characters' dynamic.
Later, as the situation unravels, it will even add some humor to fraught material, as Myra seems to contradict herself in the eagerness to be believed. But at the beginning, in her first scene with Attenborough, Stanley talks and talks, twisting a dialogue into the tone of a monologue, making Myra register as a grande dame of the stage who behaves as if the spotlight is on her though she seldom leaves this domestic theater of airless misery. There's a presentational touch to her delivery, an expressivity of body and a control of the space that are almost oppressive to witness. It's like you're put under her spell, hypnotized by a solipsistic reverie within which lie clues into what's happening in the story proper.
The Savages' son, Arthur, died at birth, and Myra insists on the existence of a connection with him. At times, she acts according to his heavenly dictums, and, on occasion, conversations bend towards him in marital disputes that already seem to anticipate when Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf would arrive on the silver screen. The room once meant for the little boy is now a cell of sorts, remodeled in the image of a hospital room in which Myra will hold Amanda, the little girl Billy is supposed to kidnap the next day. Forbes and cinematographer Gerry Turpin render it all in a rhapsody of smoke and ash, grayscale rather than black-and-white. The effect is murky, even when outside with the sun shining down. Not that there's a lot of time spent beyond closed doors.
Séance on a Wet Afternoon is fashioned into a chamber drama, trapping us, along with Amanda, in Myra's web of dreams and deceit. Technically, the Savage's house is expansive, a middle-class abode whose cavernous halls hold the memory of a wealthier past. The air tastes like decay in there, the passage of time paints shadows of decrepitude over every surface. However, the shadows are never ink-black. They're a dustier concoction. Within those walls, the camera moves studiously, while indulging in movements that pollute the clean lines of its choreography. Conversations between the Savages are nerve-wracking enough without the constant threat of a push into his frightened face or her visage, lost in some obscene parody of the beatific.
Zooms are another quirk of Séance on a Wet Afternoon's visual idioms. After a while, it starts to infect the audience with kinetic restlessness. We want to move away from Myra and Billy, but we can't, chained to their nightmare and as stir-crazy as the camera seems to be. Forbes was no formalist, but he knew how to weaponize form to the point where the prosaic stillness of an establishing shot is enough to make one squirm. And all that visceral upset can be divorced from Myra's gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss antics. Understood with that context in mind, it makes for a suffocating experience. It's the kind of cinema that's easy to admire and love without necessarily wanting to revisit.
But what a rewarding experience it is to come back to Séance on a Wet Afternoon, over and over again. I feel as if I found some new dimension in Stanley's portrait while risking another stay at the Savages' house of horrors. This go-around, her voice affected me the most, so airy and precisely controlled, so soft in sound yet barbed with an ominous portent. Moreover, it never feels strained, not in private or public, not in frank conversation with her husband, her duplicitous talk with Amanda, or her medium shtick. Her entire performance is a miracle. It helps that Myra is so perfect for Stanley, who's even able to bridge the film's most prominent, quasi-antithetical concepts – an empathetic view of maternal grief as the conduit of self-soothing delusion versus a sordid study of madness verging on the feminine grotesque.
Her innate volatility might be the key, working as a useful tap into the fantasist mania that defines so much of Myra's behavior. Or legitimate transcendental powers, depending on how you interpret the film's denouement. No matter the specifics, what Myra's going through is real to her on a fundamental level that should be at odds with her acknowledged falsities but isn't. And, again, that's all to do with Stanley's stalwart keeping of this woman's secrets. She keeps these secrets close to her chest and only reveals enough for the audience to realize she knows them in the first place. One must treasure what Stanley is willing to disclose, never taking these glimpses for granted. It's a push and pull, a dance of three – Stanley, the camera, the viewer.
The dance goes and goes, losing steam and purpose and then springing back to life. It culminates in a séance cum confession, a scream that's closer to a whisper than a howl. It's a repeat of her uncanny calm at the beginning, a mirror, and a further gesture to disorient us. It's also unforgettable, an achievement great enough to make an actor immortal and a film essential viewing from here to eternity. It was enough for the Academy to honor Stanley with her first Oscar nomination. And it was that recognition that drove me to discover Séance on a Wet Afternoon in my teens. Revisiting it today, I was shocked by how accurately I recalled this celluloid phantasmagoria wearing Kim Stanley's face. Who needs a medium when there’s an actress who can invoke the beyond just as well?
Séance on a Wet Afternoon is streaming on Max, the Criterion Channel, and TCM.