HUGE differences between film and novel (SPOILERS AHOY)
I recently picked up a very nice 1963 Pan paperback edition of Seance On A Wet Afternoon (it says on the cover 'Now being filmed by Bryan Forbes'). It were gripping, moving, disturbing, and even funny. It also had a great sense of place. Then I rewatched the film, which I'd not seen for 20 years (I read the novel having forgotten what the tragic twist were) and were v surprised how much it differed from the book.
It's a *very* good film - atmospheric, taut, slow-burning, sad - but some of the changes and additions have led me to conclude the book's better.
The back-story about Myra and Bill's stillborn son was entirely invented for the film. In the book, they're a million miles from having ever been even potential parents. Myra's described as having had no experience of children and not much liking them, so she finds it hard to be tender to the kidnapped girl, even slapping her for being 'cheeky' at one point, which gives her an edge of menace.
In the book, they live in a shabby semi in a Walthamstow cul-de-sac, not a rambling Gothic Victorian pile in Hampstead. Myra is pinched and plain, with a salt-and-pepper bun in her hair, a former fortune teller's assistant, not a whimsical blonde with a fluttery manner. Bill's got boxer's features and a long nose. He's lanky and feeble (better casting here though). The girl (Adriana, not Amanda in the book) isn't a snub-nosed, compliant, freckly little beauty, she's ordinary-looking, stroppy, tough, spoilt, a little madam. She talks back, fights back, calls Myra an old bitch.
The biggest surprise though, is how the shock twist were removed from the film *SPOILER ALERT!* In the book, when her mother attends a seance, Adriana awakes and starts yelling and having a tantrum. In order to prevent the people in the next room hearing, Bill clamps his hand over her mouth and...accidentally suffocates her. He tells Myra it were an accident, that the girl fell and bashed her head. Her response is almost psychopathic in that she seems totally unmoved. She can't understand why he's so broken ("It's not as if she were YOUR child.") and says it makes no difference to the plan, as she only said the girl would be found ("I didn't say whether she'd be alive or dead.") I got the impression in the film that Bill only pretended to kill the girl and that she ends up alive but drugged when he places her in the forest to be found. In the final titular seance, the dead girl speaks through Myra, thus giving the game away (as opposed to Myra recounting her own plan, bizarrely, as she does in the film).
Also, for all Kim Stanley's lofty reputation, her mid-Atlantic accent in the film were a bizarre thing to hear. Almost as if she kept forgetting she were meant to be English, then remembering, then forgetting again...