Seance on a Wet Afternoon Seance on a Wet Afternoon ...

Before there was Meryl Streep, Kim Stanley was celebrated as the great American actress moving from theater to film with remarkable, emotional blatancy. Stanley's finest onscreen moment is in the 1964 Seance on a Wet Afternoon. It's the creepy film version of the Myra Hindley child murder case that rocked England (and later influenced several songs by the Smiths). Stanley portrays a disturbed psychic who aims to resolve the anxiety over her own dead child by kidnapping another. She enlists the aid of her overly dutiful, too-loving husband (played by Richard Attenborough).

Director Bryan Forbes constructs the movie as a sequence of psychic breakdowns, and Stanley delivers the requisite nuanced and convincing portrayal of a woman whose maternal desperation overcomes her sanity. In the mid-60s, this performance was as heralded as Streep's in Sophie's Choice. But it's finer, less mannered and ultimately conveys greater shock. Stanley turns average feminine disquiet into universal despair. She may be portraying a criminal, but what she and Forbes emphasize is a very likely loss of control.

There's an aspect of Seance on a Wet Afternoon that puzzles over the extent of love in a marriage that makes one partner subject to another. Attenborough, one of the finest, underrated British actors, balances Stanley's dementia with a portrait of husbandly devotion that is simultaneously appalled by its extremes of dedication. He loves not wisely, but criminally. In addition to the psychological realism, director Forbes creates a chilling, rainy environment that not only creates a mood, but shot-by-shot provides a genuinely, unsettling atmosphere.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon conveys as a suitable Halloween attraction. Yes, it is deeply eerie-how can a movie about child abduction and grieving parents not be? The issue of right and wrong verges on a question of spiritual guidance or sheer hysteria. Either way, Seance is memorable as a spectacle of humane desperation. Stanley swept nearly every movie award there was (except the Oscar) in '64. What more do you need to know to seek out this curiosity/compelling drama?

-Armond White

The Man Who Laughs Directed by Paul Leni (Kino Video) A lot of you will probably recognize the character Conrad Veidt plays in Paul Leni's 1928 silent film, The Man Who Laughs even if you haven't seen the movie. Veidt's character, with his wild hair, bulging eyes, grotesquely carved smile and misshapen teeth, was an image that could be found in nearly every book about horror movies I read when I was a kid. With good reason-that makeup was scary as hell. In later years, it would become the inspiration for Batman's arch-nemesis, the Joker.

Interestingly enough, The Man Who Laughs is not a horror film. Despite the creepy make-up, impenetrable shadows and freak-show atmosphere, it's more of a melodrama, much like The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Not surprising, I guess, given that The Man Who Laughs was also based on a Victor Hugo novel.

Universal decided to make The Man Who Laughs while still riding high on the success of Hunchback and The Phantom of the Opera. As with those, Lon Chaney was expected to play the lead. He was under contract with MGM at the time, so the studio imported two men with a proven track record in German Expressionist cinema. Veidt had starred in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Leni had directed 1924's Waxworks (also with Veidt). The results were unlike anything most American audiences had seen before.

Veidt plays Gwynplaine, the son of a nobleman who is kidnapped and defaced by one of his father's enemies (who just happens to be the king). He escapes and hooks up with a traveling carnival, where he falls in love with a blind girl. Years later, the king dies and things get much more confusing, as the disfigured but kind-hearted Gwynplaine moves back into politics-only to be targeted yet again.

Like Caligari, this film is more dependent on atmosphere than it is on plot. Its deep shadows, stylized sets and cast of lost souls make it a work of pure Expressionism-as well as the model for the classic Universal horror films of the decade to follow.

Kino International has put quite a package together around The Man Who Laughs-an informative "making of" featurette, snippets from Veidt's home movies-even the text of the last few pages from Hugo's novel, showing how very far the filmmaker's strayed from the original tragic ending. Most importantly though, the print itself is stunning-and the original soundtrack has been beautifully restored.

The Man Who Laughs has, over the years, been sadly forgotten, lost in the void between Phantom and Dracula. With luck, this new release will help remind people that it was much better-and much more important-than either of those.

-Jim Knipfel

Smallville: The Complete First Season Created and executive produced by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar Even though the basic concept has been done before in print, some Superman fans (including this writer) still have a problem with the concept of the hit WB series Smallville. This coming-of-age drama about a teenage Clark Kent (Tom Welling) learning to be Superman places him in the same town as a young Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), and pits them against each other in overt and subtle ways; it's got kind of a Muppet Babies feel.

But the actors are so convincing and the entire production so consistently smart, humble and even-tempered (exciting but not exploitive; moral but not moralistic) that Smallville wins one over anyway. Even when you watch the entire first season's worth of episodes back-to-back on DVD-a surefire way to ruin even the best tv series-it still holds up surprisingly well.

The first season's packaging is handsome, and the picture and sound are brilliantly mastered. However, the set is conspicuously light on the extras home-video fans crave these days. The boxed set features voice-over commentary only on the pilot episode (by producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and director David Nutter) and the follow-up, "Metamorphosis" (Gough and Millar). A potentially promising interactive tour of Smallville, Kansas (actually a combination of Vancouver-area locations, sets and digital backdrops) is frustratingly brief and superficial, and a comparison of filmed images and storyboards from the pilot (a standard, often quite satisfying feature on science fiction and fantasy discs) is ruined here by fancy cutting and superimpositions that make it difficult to compare the ideas and their execution. The final disc also contains a making-of infomercial produced in-house by Smallville's network, the WB, which is fine if you like that sort of thing.

It's a shame Gough and Millar didn't do commentary on more episodes and have key cast or crew sit in; over and above the human drama of Superman and company, the disc is notable mainly for the producers' voice-over observations on the fine points of production design, costumes, compositions, performance and special effects. (Much of the corn and a number of important buildings were created with computer software, as were some eerily convincing butterflies in episode two.) Millar comes off as an intriguingly hands-on fellow; offhand, I can't think of any other tv producer who's so attentive to the values of color and texture onscreen. In "Metamorphosis," Millar points out the subtle placement of kryptonite green highlights in any location where mutants lurk. Talk about super-detailed.

-Matt Zoller Seitz