Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967)
**some minor spoilers throughout, possibly**
If there’s one thing that “Wait Until Dark” confirmed for me, it’s that I really, really hate Audrey Hepburn. First “My Fair Lady” and now this, and in this film in particular her delivery is forced and stiff and she has the mannerisms of a gargoyle. She’s just…unnatural. Even when this film was at its most terrifying (and yes, the climax of this film, even without the famed gimmick of turning out of the theater’s lights to their “legal limit” during the film’s original theatrical run, is very, very frightening and heartstopping) and she was supposed to be emoting pure fright, I wasn’t convinced this was anything more than an actress ‘doing’ fright. And she got an Oscar nomination for this? Why, ‘cuz her character is blind, so she stayed wide-eyed the whole time and waved her hand around when walking around that apartment? Alright, I guess she comes off as vulnerable, which is exactly what the premise calls for, but still, I wanted a performance at least twice as convincing, and Audrey Hepburn ain’t that.
Nevertheless, “Wait Until Dark,” with the absurdly simple premise of three thugs taking advantage of and then terrorizing a blind woman while searching her apartment for a heroin-stuffed doll, is a more than capable psychological thriller, evolving into outright terror and horror by the now-famed climax; this despite Hepburn the Robot and the nearly-as-perplexing performance of Alan Arkin as Roat, by far the most intelligent, and sadistic, of the three thugs. When Roat is Roat, with the black outfit and greased-down hair and hip sunglasses and comically over the top voice that sounds like a hippie mob boss or something, I didn’t like the performance. It was too kitschy; with that look and that goofy voice he was really no more than a cartoon character, supposed to hold sway over the more understated Richard Crenna and Jack Weston but really just looking different and silly in relation to his more ‘normal’ accomplices. But then, when the three put their elaborate ruse into motion, where Weston plays detective and Crenna the war buddy of Hepburn’s husband to fuck with her, we see the thousand and one faces of Alan Arkin: at any time, he shows up at that door in old man makeup ranting and raving, or as a timid businessman, all to fool poor Susy and move the plan forward, and all I could think to myself as I was just starting to get bored by that point was, ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON…’ 
. We know the whole time that Alan Arkin’s Roat is playing all these parts, but just seeing how they’re all so different from Roat is just plain weird and a total mindfuck, and throws what was a simple enough plot of deception and conniving into the realm of the utterly bizarre, and I ate up every moment of it. It’s bizarre enough that the other two are putting together this elaborate scam to get Susy to reveal the doll’s location, but my god, who knew that a hipster criminal with goofy sunglasses and a goofier demeanor could be such a great method actor during a job? As soon as Roat showed up at that door as Roat Jr., Roat Sr., and every Roat in between, Alan Arkin’s performance went from a lousy one to a pretty damn great one, all culminating in that climax. Up to this point in the film, Hepburn was almost comically typecast as pure innocence, Arkin as pure evil, to the point where they both lacked a lot of substance…but face ‘em off against each other, you’ve got one hell of a showdown. All of a sudden, Roat’s roleplaying and behind-the-scenes scheming become outright sadism as he taunts Susy with a cloth to the face or by making sounds all over the apartment, all ‘cuz of a stupid doll and some stupid heroin. At the snap of a finger, a goofy-looking and goofy-sounding pseudo-hipster becomes a terrifying sexual and sadistic predator…and just imagine if you couldn’t even see him a la Susy! He goes through a hell of a bumpy road in terms of character development, spotlighted by an introduction that was more unintentionally funny than anything, but by the end, Arkin’s Roat might just have to be considered one of the great movie villains.
Much, if not most of “Wait Until Dark” takes place in that apartment, so that makes things simple enough to establish a good trapped in a haunted house vibe (and in the case of the blind protagonist Susy, trapped within herself), and along the way there’re some good moments of suspense, like ‘will she or won’t she inadvertently bump into the dead body that’s right in front of her’ or ‘will she or won’t she hear the three thugs breathing and hiding when she comes in’ or when Roat’s doing his thing right behind Susy as she and the duplicitous Mike, silently acknowledging Roat, talk: enough cool little moments like that to keep you occupied until the balls to the wall finale. Problem is, just about everything else is either a bore, a cliché, or both, especially when it comes to the dialogue between Susy and her husband that’s like a bad parody of stilted romantic dialogue from the 30s and 40s. The elaborate hoax that the thugs play out before a clueless Susy gets to be so complicated that rather than try to follow along or get frustrated, you simply stop caring and want another ‘will she or won’t she notice or touch something’ moment. Although the arcs of Susy and Roat turns out to be more than satisfying in a thrilling display of good vs. evil, that only partially conceals the fact that they’re pretty much caricatures from the start. But you don’t come to movies like this for character development or psychological depth anyway, you come for the ‘no, don’t go in THERE!’ moments and jumps and scares, and “Wait Until Dark” has plenty of all of that. Not nearly the best in its genre, but a fine thriller nonetheless. Watch this movie for Roat(s), watch it for the unbelievably creepy notion of the thugs doing their thing while a helpless blind woman doesn’t even know they’re mere feet from her, watch it with your lights dimmed to their legal limit, and watch it for The Moment. If you’ve seen the movie, you know exactly what moment I’m talking about.
7.5/10
