Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[The regular A Movie A Day list has been frozen in order for me to do an all-horror line-up for October. I’ve pulled many horror titles from my regular “to see” stack and have ordered many more horror and thriller titles to make sure we have some good stuff. Like the regular AMAD column all the movies I’m covering are films I have never seen, but unlike the regular AMAD column I will not connect each film to the one before it. Instead I will pull a title at random every day and watch whatever the movie Gods determine for me.]
Okay, this movie is the tits. What a great, awesome little character suspense piece.
Basically you have one location and four central characters. Our hero is a blind woman, played by the instantly lovable Audrey Hepburn, who is the victim of circumstance.
Her husband, a photographer, was given a doll filled with heroine while on a flight back from Canada. He had no idea, of course, but takes the doll just before the mule, an attractive lady, is met by Alan Arkin’s Roat.
Roat is a bad motherfucker. His John Lennon sunglasses make him unpredictable, hiding his true intentions… Hell, you can call him a walking shark, with round black eyes and grinning mouth.
Of course, this girl disappears and two of her associates are called in to help find the doll.
These are Richard Crenna (Rambo’s boss!) and Jack Weston (THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, FUZZ, DIRTY DANCING and, possibly his best ever movie… that’s right, SHORT CIRCUIT 2). Hustlers, swindler, no-good charmers.
They show up to a New York apartment, thinking they’re meeting their friend, the doll lady. Instead, Alan Arkin shows up, knowing everything about them and taking them both completely off guard and tells them of the plan, offering them a nice chunk of change if they can somehow convince Hepburn to reveal the location of the doll.
Oh, yeah… and they’re in Hepburn’s apartment and have left their fingerprints all over it… and they also find Samantha Jones, the doll lady, hanging dead in the closet, compliments of Mr. Roat.
So, they have another reason to help out… a frame-up.
After spending the first 10 minutes with the baddies, we get some time with Hepburn and her husband in the picture, Sam (Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who voiced Alfred in the Dini/Timm Batman Animated Series). The filmmakers actually cram a whole lot of character work in their brief time together before the baddies return.
We come to find that Hepburn’s blindness is fairly recent and she’s learning how to cope with it. We also learn that she and her husband are very close, but he’s incredibly strict with her, even to the point of cruelty. He wants her to be self-sufficient again and risks losing the audience’s empathy at times for being so strict. There’s a point where she drops a cup and he refuses to help her find it, instead standing back and watching her feel along the floor for it. He wants her to not rely on him or help from anybody else.
It’s a delicate balance, but I believe they pulled it off, showing Sam to be strict because he cares for her. You can even make a point that this kind of conditioning helps her deal with the crooks as they force themselves into her life and home.
Let’s talk about Richard Crenna a little bit. Like most of you, I’m sure, I knew Crenna mostly as Trautman from the Rambo flicks, so it was a little bit surprising to me to see him play a character as complex as Mike Talman. He’s gray. He doesn’t want to be working with Arkin… he knows the dude is bad news, but he’s also greedy. He is a bit of a crook and he knows it, but he’s not a lunatic. He does have a heart and there are boundaries he won’t cross.
So he works this girl over, posing as a friend of her husband, a war buddy, gaining her trust. In this respect we get a little bit of con movie thrown in, complete with costume changes and age make-up as each of the Axis of Evil do their part.
Crenna is the war-buddy friend of the hubby, Weston is a loud detective and Arkin plays both an elderly man and his son as they all set up a scenario for Hepburn in which her husband (called off to a phoney photo-shoot) is a cheater and murderer.
But Hepburn smells something is off and begins to piece together the truth, using her Daredevil powers to find the clues.
And Hepburn is adorable in this movie. She always is, but there’s something to her Susy Hendrix. She’s extra vulnerable here and not just in her vision handicap. She plays the character with a bare minimum of make-up. At the time of filming she was in her late 30s and there’s something very attractive to see her embrace her age.
Not to mention that it’s right for her character. Even if she wasn’t blind you don’t get the feeling that this woman is superficial.
In short, I want to marry blind 1967 Audrey Hepburn. Consider that a proposal if you can find me a time machine.
That leads me to Alan Arkin. If I want to marry Susy Hendrix then I don’t ever want to meet Harry Roat Jr. Never-ever. Arkin is in absolutely fine form, playing one of my new favorite screen villains. Roat (which probably isn’t even his real name) is calm, cool and collected on the surface. He’s very low key, but it feels like a mask that’s barely concealing a madman.
The glasses help. If the eyes are the windows to the soul then I believe there’s a reason he’s always wearing these round obsidian black sunglasses. I think this dude’s soul is darker than tar. And when the glasses come off we tend to see him unleash his scary.
When he flips out he’s genuinely scary. You don’t know what the hell his limits are and I think by the end of it we find there are no limits.A part of me would have loved to have seen this era Arkin play The Joker if he could have channeled a little of Roat’s insanity.
I found myself completely invested in this movie. When the final act happens and we get our showdown between Audrey and Alan it’s everything I could have wanted.
If you see the DVD cover you might have a similar thought… Why is a blind woman lighting a match in the dark? Why the hell does she need light besides to make sure the audience can see her. When you see why she’s lighting that match you’ll want to cheer.
It’s pretty genius and I can’t imagine how awesome it was to see the stage version of this (originated with Lee Remick and Robert Duvall… in the late ‘90s there was a revival starring Marisa Tomei and Quentin Tarantino, of all people). It really is a match of wills and determination and there’s something very cathartic watching someone so obviously a victim… Blind Audrey Hepburn doesn’t exactly cry out as a strong action hero… hold their own against such an aggressive force of lunatic energy.
Robert and Jane-Howard Carrington deserve a lot of credit for their adaptation of Frederick Knott’s (DIAL M FOR MURDER) play, giving us such a powerful character driven suspense film. Just as much credit goes to director Terence Young (DR. NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, THUNDERBALL) for keeping a film set predominantly in one apartment moving and visually interesting.
Double Feature suggestion: Check out the Jennifer Jason Leigh as blind girl stalked by a creep in 1981’s EYES OF A STRANGER. It’s not nearly as good as WAIT UNTIL DARK, but it’s a great little underseen and underappreciated thriller.
Final Thoughts: Combine great performances, a smart script with intelligent character work, strong direction and a great score by Henry Mancini and you get one of the best suspense films ever put out. This movie is lightning in a bottle that captures one of the best villain performances ever put to screen, hands down. Arkin is amazing in this movie and I wish to god someone like Neca would have the balls to put out a Harry Roat Jr. figure. I might be one of the only people that bought it, but I’d be a happy, happy geek.
Here are the titles in the drawing pool for the rest of October:
Wednesday, October 1st – Friday, October 31st: H-MAD! Horror Movie A Day! Check out the list here!
Now’s the the time to pull the next HMAD!
Next up is:
Sweet. I have a lot of friends who like the same kind of ‘80s horror I do and they ensure me I’m in for a treat with DEAD & BURIED. Can’t wait! See you tomorrow for that!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
