Seance on a Wet Afternoon

Kim Stanley can hardly be known to most of today's cinema audiences: she appears in only four films, and her fame rests on her stage work (even that is pretty sparse). She plays degenerating women, yet her technique is not the Mad Medusa writ large, such as Swanson in Sunset Blvd. or Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She's creepier than that, and more believable. In the movie, she is married to a meek and mild Attenborough - a childless marriage in a gloomy Victorian house. She concocts a scheme to kidnap a child, and then gain notoriety by discovering the child's whereabouts through psychomancy. Her performance is utterly superb, and so too is Attenborough's: with his leather crash helmet, goggles and clapped-out motor-bike, he looks like a reject Hell's Angel from Orphée.