Old Yorker

Terence Young (1967)

There’s a national touring production of Wait Until Dark in British theatres currently – Frederick Knott’s thriller has proved durable since it was first staged on Broadway in 1966, with Lee Remick in the lead role of the blind New York housewife Susy Hendrix.  Warner Bros bought the screen rights to the play soon after the Broadway opening.  Terence Young’s film, with a screenplay by Robert and Jane-Howard Carrington, was in cinemas, and doing excellent box-office, by the autumn of 1967.  Mel Ferrer produced the picture; Audrey Hepburn, who was his wife at the time (but not for much longer), starred.  Wait Until Dark is a one-set play – Susy and her photographer husband Sam’s basement apartment in Greenwich Village – and claustrophobia is crucial to the piece.  The risk of diluting the material by opening it up is so obvious that you wonder if the film-makers might resist the temptation.  They don’t but at least most of the external action is confined to a prelude to the main events of the story – though it’s a lengthy prelude.

In Montreal, a young woman called Lisa (Samantha Jones) is waiting for an elderly man to sew up a doll.  Although she says she has a plane to catch and is in a hurry, Lisa doesn’t look or sound especially impatient – not, that is, until she exits the seamster’s place.  Out on the snowy street, she switches abruptly into an anxious tizzy and tries to hail a cab – as if the director had just yelled instructions at her to look lively.   This is reasonably typical of the mechanical but oddly negligent early sequences of the film.  Lisa, as a means of avoiding suspicion about its obviously narcotic contents, is brandishing the doll when she goes through security in Montreal and when her plane lands in New York.  On arrival at JFK, she doesn’t like the look of a man watching her from a distance.  She passes the doll to a fellow-passenger, for safekeeping, before the dodgy man hustles her away.  The surprised recipient of her hand luggage is Sam Hendrix (Efrem Zimbalist Jr).  Lisa’s rough-handler is Harry Roat (Alan Arkin), whose quest for a doll is as central to the plot of Wait Until Dark as Robert Mitchum’s was in The Night of the Hunter (1955).  That’s the beginning and end of resemblances between Charles Laughton’s excellent film and this mostly feeble one.

Roat, after murdering Lisa, blackmails two conmen into helping him dispose of her body and track down the drugs stash in the Hendrixes’ home.  He sends Sam out of the apartment by setting up an urgent bogus work assignment for him to go to.  It’s only once Susy is at the mercy of the criminals that Wait Until Dark gets underway.  Even then, it seems to be going through the motions until the last half-hour, when the terrified but resourceful Susy turns the tables on Roat so that he too is in the dark.  The direction of Terence Young (best known for the early James Bond films) isn’t inspired but the main problem is the weak plotting, though this is presumably a legacy of Knott’s serviceable original.  The most basic question:  why doesn’t Susy, who uses the telephone several times during the course of her ordeal, think to call the police on the occasions when Roat and his sidekicks, Talman (Richard Crenna) and Carlino (Jack Weston), temporarily leave the stage?   Her not doing this is so fundamentally implausible that it makes the whole thing artificial – a matter of getting the heroine and the main villain into position for an extended showdown that can have only one winner.

Audrey Hepburn works hard and shows plenty of technical skill acting blindness with wide-open eyes but she’s impossibly ladylike, even when Susy is fighting for her life.   As Gloria (Julie Herrod), a young girl who lives upstairs and whom the Hendrixes have befriended, says enviously, Susy is ‘gorgeous’.  (Gloria, with her outsize specs, is made to look anything but.)  At the very end of the film, with Roat vanquished, Susy collapses gratefully into the arms of Sam.  Audrey Hepburn has just the one discreet bloodstain on her pale pink sweater.   It’s a mildly pleasing ironic detail that shady Roat wears dark glasses but Alan Arkin’s appearance, thanks to a bad hairpiece, is predominantly silly and his performance pretty crude, though he has a few good nasty moments late on.  Even though he’s bound to be defeated, the shot in which the injured Roat rises from the ground and virtually flies through the air to grab at Susy supplies a real jolt. Richard Crenna and Efrem Zimbalist Jr are physically almost interchangeable:  it’s somewhat unfortunate, given their roles, that Zimbalist is much the duller of the two.  The overdone scary music confirms that its composer, Henry Mancini, was no more at home in the territory of Wait Until Dark than its star.  The two of them worked much more comfortably and successfully together in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and Charade (1963).

24 October 2017