Movies in Brief

Séance on a Wet Afternoon. Unfashionably, there is a plot, but it is fashionably bizarre, and the center of consciousness is mad: a medium (Kim Stanley) and her husband (Richard Attenborough) kidnap a child so that in good time she can reveal her remarkable powers to a grateful world, according to suggestions made by their own child, who was born dead. You can always take one mad character, and the medium was brought up that way, but her husband’s complicity is less easily explained and barely acceptable. Apart from that, Bryan Forbes’ adaptation is fairly successful. His direction occasionally calls attention to itself, but his cast carries it through. Miss Stanley’s nagging sort of niceness seems perfect, much more chilling than the ferocity one might have expected would have been. Her last séance is too neatly contrived, but a great success anyway.

Baby, the Rain Must Fall. Texan Gothic, Europeanized. A young lady (Lee Remick) and her daughter (a dreadful actress) arrive at one of those picturesque, hardly-inhabited towns to join the man of the family (Steve McQueen), who is out on parole. He wants to go on with his string band and his song-writing. There seems to be no reason why he shouldn’t. His music is by Elmer Bernstein, and everyone has heard worse. Unfortunately, the wicked spinster who brought him up so badly will not have it. Come to think of it, performing does bring out the worst in him. He has a tendency to stab rude audiences. Anyway, he’s a loser, as the ads say; everybody’s a loser. Horton Foote’s script is vague at best, and Robert Mulligan’s direction is expressionistically lugubrious, as the camera grinds away at significant objects, dreary landscapes and sad, hopeful faces.

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Richard M. Hodgens

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Séance on a Wet Afternoon. Unfashionably, there is a plot, but it is fashionably bizarre, and the center of consciousness is mad: a medium (Kim Stanley) and her husband (Richard Attenborough) kidnap a child so that in good time she can reveal her remarkable powers to a grateful world, according to suggestions made by their own child, who was born dead. You can always take one mad character, and the medium was brought up that way, but her husband’s complicity is less easily explained and barely acceptable. Apart from that, Bryan Forbes’ adaptation is fairly successful. His direction occasionally calls attention to itself, but his cast carries it through. Miss Stanley’s nagging sort of niceness seems perfect, much more chilling than the ferocity one might have expected would have been. Her last séance is too neatly contrived, but a great success anyway.

Baby, the Rain Must Fall. Texan Gothic, Europeanized. A young lady (Lee Remick) and her daughter (a dreadful actress) arrive at one of those picturesque, hardly-inhabited towns to join the man of the family (Steve McQueen), who is out on parole. He wants to go on with his string band and his song-writing. There seems to be no reason why he shouldn’t. His music is by Elmer Bernstein, and everyone has heard worse. Unfortunately, the wicked spinster who brought him up so badly will not have it. Come to think of it, performing does bring out the worst in him. He has a tendency to stab rude audiences. Anyway, he’s a loser, as the ads say; everybody’s a loser. Horton Foote’s script is vague at best, and Robert Mulligan’s direction is expressionistically lugubrious, as the camera grinds away at significant objects, dreary landscapes and sad, hopeful faces.