Wait Until Dark is a tense,
chilling thriller for it’s first fifteen minutes and its final half
hour. In between, it never actually becomes a bad film, but loses a
lot of its drive. The story revolves around a con game being played
on a blind woman and on the way in which it unravels, largely because
the con men assumed her to be helpless.
The setup is more complicated than I
want to fully explain, but a man named Sam (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr) is
asked to hold a doll, not knowing that it contains heroin. Lisa, the
woman who planted it on him (Samantha Jones), is killed by an
associate named Roat (Alan Arkin). Roat recruits two of Lisa’s
former associates, Carlino and Talman (Jack Weston and Richard
Crenna) to try to find the doll which Sam and his blind wife Susy
(Audrey Hepburn) are unable to locate because it’s been taken by
Gloria (Julie Herrod), a young girl who helps Susy with chores.
The opening, after the set-up with the
doll, is tense as it establishes the characters of Roat, Carlino, and
Talman. Their initial meeting is designed to demonstrate Talman and
Carlino as being hostile to Roat, cooperating solely for profit.
Roat is shown as being a brilliant but vicious tactician, able to
easily manipulate the other two and predict their every move;
constantly calculating how to make it just barely worth the trouble
to work with him.
From here, we eventually wind our way
into the con, which is convoluted as Hell. Perhaps that was the
point, trying to convince Susy that they couldn’t possibly be
making this stuff up. Or maybe it was just padding. Either way,
Susy is introduced to a “friend” of her husband’s named Mike, a
cop, and the husband and father-in-law of a woman they claim Sam was
having an affair with. She is eventually convinced that the doll is
evidence of her husband’s connection to Lisa’s murder, so she has
to give it to Mike so that he can get rid of it.
The con eventually falls apart as the
men underestimate Susy. It never occurs to them that when dealing
with a blind woman, changing shoes would be a more critical part of
their disguise than changing their hair color. They’re also
unaware of Gloria’s presence, which does give Susy insights at key
moments which they never intended her to have.
Eventually, Roat kills his companions
and resorts to far more direct threats to get to the doll. It’s at
this point where the movie again takes off. Roat chains Susy and
himself in and threatens to set the apartment on fire, while Susy
kills the lights, knowing that she’s better able to fight in the
dark than Roat. While it’s true that the idea of a blind person
having an advantage in the dark is nothing new to us, this movie came
out in 1967, when such an idea would have been far more novel.
(...Or so I suppose, because I wasn’t alive in 1967.) The
confrontation eventually turns into a game of cat-and-mouse with two
knives, matches, gasoline, and the refrigerator light being used as
weapons.
Alan Arkin’s performance in this film
is astounding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more frightening
villain of purely-human origin in a film (yes, I’m including
Hannibal Lecter, I’m going there). He’s smart, vicious, and
entirely focused on his goals.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot
positive to say about Hepburn’s character. I have nothing against
the actress herself, and she did an excellent job. But Susy comes
across as a very weak character. While it’s true that she figures
out she’s being conned, once she does, she comes across as
surprisingly helpless. She reacts to most revelations by screaming
and crying. Furthermore, when facing Roat, she seems to be unable to
take the initiative to do anything when there’s light. After he’s
been stabbed, can barely stand, and is slowly limping towards her
(making plenty of noise to give away his location), her reaction is
to desperately try to unplug the refrigerator to extinguish the final
remaining light, rather than grabbing the nearest blunt object and
attacking the already severely-wounded man.
I should also note that I have no idea
what her motivation to deny the men the doll was, at least after she
realizes it isn’t evidence against her husband. She seems to
indicate it’s out of some generic desire to not assist “Evil”
people, even when they’re about the kill you, and you have no
particular interest in the thing they want.
All that said, I do recommend this
movie. It could be more tightly-written, but Alan Arkin alone makes
the experience more than worth it.
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