MovieChat Forums > Thrillers/Suspense > [Last Film I Watch] Wait Until Dark (196...

[Last Film I Watch] Wait Until Dark (1967) [7/10]

posted 9 years ago by lasttimeisaw
2 replies | jump to latest

Title: Wait Until Dark
Year: 1967
Country: USA
Language: English, French
Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Director: Terence Young
Writers:
Robert Carrington
Jane-Howard Carrington
based on Frederick Knott’s play
Music: Henry Mancini
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Cast:
Audrey Hepburn
Alan Arkin
Richard Crenna
Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
Jack Weston
Samantha Jones
Julie Herrod
Rating: 7/10

Our Beloved Audrey Hepburn’s last Oscar-nominated performance, a rare genre piece in her filmography, WAIT UNTIL DARK officially bookends her salad days with a sterling turn into a terrorised victim in this Terence Young’s almost one-basement-apartment-confined thriller, based on Frederick Knott’s play.

Susan Hendrix (Hepburn), became blind in a car accident one year earlier, now lives with her newly-espoused photographer husband Sam (Zimbalist Jr.) in NYC . Their life is quite placid, Susan goes to the blind school to adopt her new life pattern, while Sam is engaged in work, little they know, a doll sealed with cocaine is in their possession, just because Sam implausibly accepts it from the request of a complete stranger, a sultry blonde Lisa (Jones) in the airport when he travels back from Montreal. And more implausibly, Sam not only doesn’t rise any suspicion towards the item, when Lisa wants it back, he even forgets its whereabouts.

Soon Lisa is dispatched by her partner-in-crime Roat (Arkin) for trying to pocket all the smuggled cocaine, and he gangs up with Mike (Crenna) and Carlino (Weston), Lisa’s former associates, two small-time gangsters, together they deploy a scheme to deceive the poor blind Susan into giving up the doll. One day, when Sam is away from an assignment in New Jersey, Mike pretends to be a friend of his and visits Susan, and gets her trust by being amiable and polite, then Roat stages a scene to implicate that Sam is in liaison with the dead Lisa, and Carlino’s fake sergeant also shows up, all three manage to convince Susan, the doll is the key evidence can incriminate Sam with Lisa’s death, so as that she can hand it to them. But, the core problem is Susan also has no idea where is the fricking doll! Until, in the midpoint of the taut narrative, it reappears in the house and it is Gloria (Herrod), a girl lives upstairs, who takes it and just in time to return it in the critical moment.

After unwisely informing Mike she has the doll, Susan put her own safely in the danger especially when she realises all these three uninvited visitors are actually in the same league to retrieve the doll, how can she fight against them? Numerously missing the chance to ask help from the police, after wisely sending Gloria to meet Sam in the station, she finds out the telephone line has been cut off, so her life is hanging by a thread. Luckily there is a silver lining under the desperate situations, which is the ill feeling among the three criminals, Mike and Carlino never trust the cunning Roat, but the latter turns out to be even more insidious and callous than they can ever imagine. Eventually, it advances into a face-off between Roat and Susan, where an edge-of-the-seat episode of battling in the darkness makes Susan our reluctant heroine in the end.

The film gathers some strong dissonance of its glaring dramatic license, which tempers real-life authenticity in favour of its theatrical manipulation (all the why doesn’t she lock the door complain, why she doesn’t call the police or ask Gloria to call the police?, etc.). Most obviously is that blind people don’t need light, but what is behind her decision to light up matches during the confrontation in the dark is truly baffling. Yet cinema is the art where vision is its most direct receptor and lightning is one integral part, audience cannot stand a long-spell of pitch black while all the happenings are sheer unseeable. Although, in the climate of experimental cinema, it would be an innovative attempt to defy our usual viewing habits.

Be that as it may, Hepburn’s acting alone is worth your ticket, seldom seen in such a terrified state out of her comfort zone, not to mention she nails a competent emulation of a blind person. Undeniably, there is a morbid thrill to watch those top-notch actresses being put into a victimised cul-de-sac (one major reason why we love WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? 1962), is it a natural inclination? I hope so. Also, a convincing victim needs an equally relentless perpetrator, Arkin, only in his second film, is mesmerisingly menacing and utterly abhorrent to watch, a brilliant villain makes one wish there would never be anyone like him, as in reality, Susan would have no chance to survive in his merciless hands. Crenna’s Mike, brings a whiff of conscience when he becomes more emotionally invested in his role-playing, not an out-and-out scoundrel, but all the same, has no chance to become the hero who saves the beautiful girl.

Immensely entertaining, a great career-turn for Ms. Hepburn, which reminds us how great if she would take on more diversified roles in her mature years, trademark score from Henry Mancini, WAIT UNTIL DARK might not be the year’s best, but not deserves all the backlash either.

http://lasttimeisawdotcom.wordpress.com/ My Diva Trinity: Dench, Moore and Blanchett

[–] rwilcox-5 9 years ago

Yes I've seem it. Wonderful. In the same league as rear window.

[–] cyninbend-149-610489 9 years ago

I remember the first my sister and I saw this movie, in a huge movi9e theater in 1967 or 8, when it was first out. We were far more naive then, and when a main character was as lovely, sweet and kind, and especially as vulnerable as a blind Audrey Hepburn, we gave ourselves entirely into the story and her character. This was before we had been shocked by our hero turning out to have flaws. No one had thought to have our sweet heroine be revealed to be a drug-dealing kingpin herself as subsequent dramas have done. There was no reason not to trust the storyline completely. And that goes for her husband as well. While we still wondered if he might be guilty of something, we were pretty trusting.

So this movie scared us through and through! For a couple of weeks, we had to have lights on, could not enter a darkened room alone. This movie did such a great job for that time period, making us totally absorb ourselves in the plot, characters and story. While it was strange her husband was willing to take the doll, this was long before those questions in airports, "Did you pack your own bag?" "Did anyone give you anything to carry aboard the flight?" People were allowed to do some foolish things that they could not explain. We weren't 2d guessing everyone's actions like we have been taught to do today by all the pretend news shows that dissect every crime and terror incident item by item encouraging us to judge everything anyone involved even tangentially did...Could YOU have prevented the deaths? Would faster thinking have saved the 238 persons aboard the airliner? Etc etc etc.

In the 1960s, life went on at an easier pace. Something like what happened in this movie would have shocked the participants so much that they may as well have been beamed onto a UFO and dropped into a foreign city during war time. And that is how the movie affected us. We were calmly enjoying the domestic bliss of the newlyweds, hurting for Susan losing her sight and feeling a bit schmaltzy over the way her husband still loved her and doted on her....then WHAM! KILLERS! And we are fully identifyingt with Susan, blind and helpless, and these monsters are willing to murder her.

In the dark theater, we related so well to her blindness. And of course, it was late in the evening when we got out, very dark--no theaters in the few malls built by that time...unstead, the theaters were large buildings on main thoroughfares with parking lots in the rear, and they ushered us out the back doors into the parking lot and side street where we had parked when the movie was over....we walked the dark street to the dark car, unlocked it manually, the first light showing when we opened the car door. Getting home we were still shaking, the adrenalin still in our blood. Psychologically, we could feel the fear of being blind and having sighted murderers after us, willing to do anything, kill anyone... Before we were taught there is so much that is worse than dying.

I saw this movie again a few years ago, interrupted by commercials, at home with the lights shining from adjacent rooms and the side of the TV, reminding me I was not blind, no one was trying to murder me or someone I loved. And it seemed a bit preposterous, a bit silly. Melodramatic. But in 1967, in that dark theater, it was not melodramatic! It had you holding tightly to those you came with. It had us literally jumping and screaming at every noise for a week or more. Sleeping with a night light. It's too bad we can't recreate that openness to the experience for todays movie audiences. That naivete let us be thoroughly entertained and escape into movies and theme park attractions without reservation. People need that escape today.