Wait Until Dark (1967)

 

Wait Until Dark (1967)

 

This is a remarkably good film considering how remarkably club-footed the story is. It’s a Woman in Peril/Home Invasion Thriller with a seemingly straight-forward conceit: Sam Hendrix has accidentally come into the possession of something that he has no idea what the real value is. He’s Stalked by Villains, Mike Talman, Carlino and Harry Roat, who want it, but when Sam leaves it in his apartment, he mostly exits the plot. Instead, it is his wife Susy, who is blind, that must face the Villains. She should be easy pickings, but as the Villains close in, she is perceptive enough to realize she’s in danger, and proves to be far more resourceful than the Villains could’ve predicted.

 

This would’ve been a fine 25-minute episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (TV series first aired 1955) but instead was bloated to more than three times that length as a Broadway play (1966) penned by Frederick Knott. Knott also wrote “Dial M for Murder” (first version 1953) another over-contrived thriller that ultimately proved so much better than it should’ve been. In both films, Writer Knott got lucky, “Dail M for …” got adapted by Director Alfred Hitchcock. “Wait Until Dark” got pretty faithfully at tightly executed adapted to the screen by Scriptwriting team Robert Carrington and Jane-Howard Carrington; they were just beginning the careers and Jane-Howard would become one of TV’s great Writers in pretty shirt-order.

 

So, this should’ve been lame film is actually great, so before we get to the great, let’s get the bad stuff out-of-the-way:

 

Sam’s obtaining the item of value, a doll stuffed with heroin, is improbable and requires he committing an egregious SPT (Stupid People Trick) in order to obtain it, place it in his apartment, and forget about it. The Villain’s plan to con Suzy into giving them the doll is ridiculous. When Suzy smells a rat, she fails to lock the door and worse sends a neighbor to find Sam instead of getting the Police. Critic Roger Ebert wrote, “The bad guys come in and out of the apartment like finalists in a revolving door sweepstakes.”

 

Also, I found Sam and Suzy’s relationship more than a little creepy, he’s supposed to be the good guy, and he keeps talking about her developing her independence despite her disability, but he treats her more like his child than his wife. This is in the context of a story that hinges on him being far more easily fooled than she, and her showing a resourcefulness that he couldn’t have imagined. How he acted in the very last scene made me wanna smack him.

 

This was a pre-Feminist film (yeah, I know that “The Feminine Mystique” had already been published in 1963, but no one attached to the Writing here seems to have noticed) and quite Chauvinistic. Suzy is only recently blinded and the “important” things she feels cheated out of are “to cook a soufflé, pick necktie, choose wallpaper.” There’s a telling moment early in the film where Suzy and Sam are arguing and what she says proves to be at odds with all we see:

 

Suzy: “Do I have to be the world's champion blind lady?” [She turns her back to hide the tears welling up in her eyes, but then she faces him determinedly, saying] “Then I will be; I'll be whatever you want me to be.”

 

This suggests Sam’s ownership and Suzy’s submission, but this Chauvinism is at odds with the rest of the film, wherein Sam is nothing and Suzy is everything.

 

It should’ve been junk, but this film abounds with other virtues, two of which counted for more than all the rest. So, on the good stuff:

 

The number one saving grace is that Suzy was played by Audrey Hepburn.

 

Flat-out, I love Hepburn’s on-screen persona. In film after film, she’s impossibly, yet still convincingly, sweet. She’s naïve in the most attractive way but there’s always with a reservoir of innate intelligence that seems improbable in the beginning while obvious in the end. She’s always unfailingly compassionate. Though I object to the plot mechanics, much of it still works because the Villains’ underestimation of Suzy infuriates us, making us cheer for her all the more as she starts turning the tables on them. Before the final confrontation (scary as all heck) one of the Villains, Mike Talman played by Richard Crenna, has been won over by her as completely as we have; he shows her more respect than her husband, Sam, played by Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. That Hepburn and Crenna have better on-screen chemistry than Hepburn and Zimbalist should’ve been a deal-killer, but somehow it actually increases the film’s poignancy.

 

Number two, Director Terence Young kept the plot’s complications clear and the events moving at and adequate pace instead of it getting slogged in its own bloat. He also flawlessly executed the very complicated and magnificently suspenseful climax.

 

Regarding Young’s contribution, it will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the majority of either his best, or his worst, work. He made his name with set-piece and spectacle-dependent Actioners (his early career involved a lot of War Movies and then he became World-famous in the early-to-mid-1960s for directing the first three James Bond films) while ending his career disreputably in the ghetto of “Director-for-Hire.”  Later-career he was generally called in to finish terrible films after the production had already fallen apart (“The Klansman” (1974)), doing cheesy Sidney Sheldon adaptations (“Bloodline” (1979)), or working for the utterly disreputable, like Editing a Biopic of Saddam Hussein that was financed by the Genocidal Monster himself (“The Long Days” (1980)), and Directed a hugely expensive and utterly dreadful War Movie financed by a Right-Wing Religious cult (“Inchon” (1981)). Two of the last four mentioned have made lists of “The Worst Movies Ever Made,” while the other two are too obscure to piss people off that much.

 

Here though, he’s more than merely good, he’s exquisitely focused and disciplined, begging comparisons to Director Hitchcock in ways not applicable to anything else (neither the best or worst) on his resume. I’ll go farther, as both Directors adapted the work of Play-Write Knott, and though most days Young may not have been as good as Hitchcock, his Knott was a lot better than Hitchcock’s Knott.

 

Though theater is the most obvious place to look for good source material for films, they are different medias and create different environments. Filmed plays too often feel awkwardly stage-bound a that sucks the energy out of the story (“Dracula” (1931) is an example of this) so most Directors have the stories “opened up,” revised to allow for more locations and using more extensive incidental music and sound effects than live-theater can’t easily contain (“Frankenstein” (also 1931) was a better piece of cinema).

 

Young defied both these traditions. He did have a great score (provided by Henry Mancini) but didn’t rely on it as much as anyone else who was doing anything else the same year -- since Suzy’s character relies on her hearing as her primary sense, silences are scariest for her. He also chose to play to claustrophobia, so after Sam arrives at his and Suzy’s apartment in the beginning, almost the entire rest of the film unfolds inside that one small set.

 

Instead, Young kept his camera in motion within the confined space, but more importantly, the people never stood still: as they cross the small rooms, they move from close-up to middle-shot, and back again. As the sighted-Villains toy with the blind girl, they move around her like ghosts they only the anointed audience can see. Young shot this as an Action Movie even in its quiet moments, long before the Action-Packed finale arrived.

 

Other virtues worth noting, Julie Herrod is very good as Gloria, an unusually complex child character, a fourteen-year-old veering back-and-forth wildly between devotion and cruelty towards Suzy (she has a schoolgirl crush on Sam) and both the devotion and the cruelty are deftly worked as plot points while Suzy negotiates the tiny space full of Villains.

 

The wickedest of these Villains is psychopathic Harry, played by Alan Arkin, who is better known for his Comedy roles. Done up in Beatnik attire, he exudes a reptilian narcissism, relishing in his own complete lack of conscience because he believes makes him stronger than all others. His character is as pure a distillation of malice as Robert Mitchum’s Villains in “Night of the Hunter” (1955) and “Cape Fear” (1962) but lacking in the other Monsters’ charisma, which is not a failing but a point of Characterization. He knows how despised he is, he expects his Partners to betray him, and he’s right. Following his besting of both of his hardened Criminal Partners, we must ask, what kind of chance does the blind girl have alone against such a Beast?

 

(Arkin, in interviews, has stated that the toughest part of the role was to get into a mental place where one could actually be mean to Hepburn).

 

Then, of course, is the climax, a mano-a-mano between Suzy and Harry unfolding as, one-by-one, each light source in the tiny apartment disappears. It was a boldly complex and violent confrontation for its day. Many other reviewers who have been harsh with the early passages of the film as I have been, but all still agree that this hair-raising scene as alone makes the experience worth-while.

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogGKBiMX8KU