Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
"And then, topsy turvy. Me topsy and them turvy.", March 9, 2004
Wait Until Dark (1967) is based on a popular play by Frederick Knott and directed by Terrance Young who also did the 007 classic Thunderball (1965). The lovely Audrey Hepburn plays Susy Hendrix, a woman left recently blind by a car accident, who is learning to adjust and cope with her new perspective on life. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. is Sam Hendrix, Susy's photographer husband, with whom she shares a basement apartment in New York. Also starring is Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, and character actor Jack Weston.
The story involves illegal substances being smuggled into the United States within a doll, and then the doll being passed along to Susy's husband at the airport under curious but strictly coincidental circumstances. Alan Arkin plays Roat, a seedy character who was supposed to be the intended recipient of the doll/drugs, and Richard Crenna and Jack Weston are two thuggish types who get roped into helping Roat try to retrieve the doll.
Hepburn plays her role wonderfully, never once giving the viewer the impression that she isn't blind. A number of subtle points are made to allude to the strengthening of her other senses, hearing, smell, etc., that one finds common with the loss of sight. As the criminals construct their elaborate plans to liberate their illicit merchandise, Hepburn's character, being somewhat naive in the beginning, soon realizes the true sense of the danger she's in, and reacts perfectly within the nature of her character. Arkin plays his character(s) with the smooth cunning of a predator hunting its' prey, maliciously savoring the moments before the figurative kill. His beatnik appearance and demeanor mask his true form, which is revealed later on within the unfolding of the plot. This film is very suspenseful for those with the patience to follow it through to the end. It may not have the out and out scares the title might imply, but the gradual building of tension and suspense is delicious as the viewer is 'in the know' while the main character is left to struggle with the situations. Although an exceptionally strong supporting cast helps, Hepburn really makes this film, and was awarded with an Oscar nomination for her performance. She even went so far as to attend a school for the visually impaired and learn to read Braille to better understand her character.
The print on this disc looks very nice and is in wide screen anamorphic format. Special features include a featurette on the film, an essay about transferring the play to the silver screen, and trailers for the movie. This is truly a taut thriller worthy being released on DVD, and I am appreciative of Warner Brothers for putting it out, even if I find their plastic and cardboard packaging to be cheap and annoying.
Cookieman108
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
Audrey Hepburn as the world's champion blind lady, August 9, 2004
That's what Audrey Hepburn plays in Wait Until Dark, based on the play by Frederick Knott, the genius behind Dial M For Murder. Her role as Suzy Hendrix is one of the most challenging, as she played a physically handicapped person. She prepared by going to the Lighthouse for the Blind academy in Manhattan, and spent time with a student, who showed how she found her way around a room. Audrey also took Braille lessons, covering her eyes with black shields, walking with a stick, and applying makeup without a mirror. Then there were the contact lens, used to simulate the blank look conveyed by blind people. Given the calibre of this movie, Ms. Hepburn passes with flying colours.
Now, for the World's Champion Blind Lady's Story. Suzy, who lost her sight in an accident, becomes the unwitting pawn by three crooks desperate to regain a doll her husband was given for safekeeping by a blonde at an airport. Seems that Lisa, the blonde, was smuggling heroin in the doll, trying to double cross Roat, the ringleader of the crooks, and was murdered for her duplicity. Roat blackmails his reluctant cohorts, Mike Talman and Carlino, into helping him, but offers them $2,000 each to help him search for the doll.
Mike passes himself as a Marine buddy of her husband Sam and wins her confidence. All the while, a large VW van parked across the street by the phone booth serves as their center of operations. Roat-played to slimy perfection by Alan Arkin, whose favourite toy is a knife named Geraldine, is quite the mastermind. He arranges things so Sam has to go to Asbury Park for an all-day photo job so that he and his cohorts can come and go to the Hendrix's flat under various pretences to search for the doll, and gain information from our heroine. At one point, he disguises himself as his own father, breaks into Suzy's house on the pretence of thinking his daughter-in-law is having an affair with a photographer named Sam Hunt. That leads to Talman, a convenient witness, calling for the police, actually Carlino at the phone booth, posing as a police sergeant. Roat himself gives Suzy a half-truth of the story, mentioning a doll. Suzy does remember Sam bringing home a doll he was looking after, but the doll has mysteriously vanished.
The crooks are thus desperate to find the doll and Suzy is desperate to clear her husband. It doesn't take her long to figure out that a missing woman found murdered was the same woman who passed the doll to Sam, and that Sam will be implicated unless the doll is found. This challenge exemplifies Sam's pushing Suzy to be the world's champion blind lady, trying to be more self-reliant, and as much of her former self while she still had her sight.
That leads to a scene where she drops a salt shaker and uses her hand in a circular sweeping motion to find it. All the while, she tells Sam she doesn't like Gloria, a pouty bespectacled teenager named Gloria, whose family life is less than stable. She says she prefers a dog, but as Sam says, dogs can't go shopping.
At one point, Suzy muses that there are some things she wants to do, such as pick out wallpaper or colours for the house, something she can never do with this dark brown she constantly sees. Yet her sense of hearing has improved. She notes that Mr. Roat and his father's shoes had the same new shoe squeak. She also remarks to Gloria that Carlino and Roat were playing with the blinds.
Most of the film takes place in Suzy's apartment, remaining true to its stage origins. And Wait Until Dark is a well-paced thriller that comes alive when Suzy finally figures things out, highlighted by a climactic gripping scene in the near dark of the flat, with Suzy being terrorized by the odious Roat.
"She is really something," Mike says of her at one point, and Suzy is a heroine to root for. Nominated for but losing the Best Actress award, this was Hepburn's last great film and last Oscar nomination. It marked the end of an era as well as the end of her marriage to Mel Ferrer, who produced this film, and a nine year hiatus broken by Robin and Marian.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Genuinely scary, and one of Hepburn's finest performances, November 24, 2002
This was the last film that Audrey Hepburn made before she retired at age 38, deciding to quit while she was still on top. Although she later made ROBIN AND MARIAN with Sean Connery, and made a few later appearances in later films, this was the end of her star career. Appropriately, it is one of her very greatest performances, with her skills as an actress, if anything, continuing to grow. Audrey plays a woman left alone in her apartment who is preyed on by three men attempting to recover a doll filled with narcotics her husband has accidently acquired. The cast carries this film. Audrey Hepburn is so good that it would have succeeded regardless of what anyone else in the film had done. As a recently blinded person learning to cope with her new condition, she is utterly convincing. She manages to persuade completely the viewer that she really is quite vulnerable yet completely unwilling to give in to her situation. Alan Arkin, in one of his earliest film roles and his first since his Oscar nominated performance in THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING, THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!, gives a chilling performance as Roat, the leader of the bad guys. It was interesting casting, since Arkin was primarily a comedian, one of the founders of the Second City comedy troupe. It is one of the finest performances of his career. Richard Crenna was primarily known as a TV performer at the time, having been a regular on two of the most successful shows of all time, OUR MISS BROOKS and THE REAL McCOYS. He is very effective as the con artist who comes to like and admire his would-be victim. It is not a perfect film. If one didn't already know that it had been a stage play, any perceptive viewer would be able to tell by watching. It is a profoundly "stagey" production, and the way the various characters traipse in and out of her apartment is a bit hard to swallow at times. It feels too much like characters walking on and off stage in a theater. Still, the acting is so exceptional and the situation so compelling that it is easy to cut the film a lot of slack. I will add that the last fifteen or twenty seconds of the film are a little off putting. It functions on a symbolic level, but it unsatisfying emotionally. I wanted to scream: "Just go give the woman a hug, you jerk!" The last thirty minutes of the film really are about as scary on a psychological level as anything Hollywood has produced. When it was originally shown in theaters, in the scene where Audrey Hepburn begins breaking all the light bulbs in her apartment, the theater would either darken or dim the lights in the house, with each bulb she would shatter. In the spirit of that, I definitely recommend watching this one in a darkened house.
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