Wait Until Dark (film)
Encyclopedia
Wait Until Dark is a suspense
Suspense
Suspense is a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety about the outcome of certain actions, most often referring to an audience's perceptions in a dramatic work. Suspense is not exclusive to fiction, though. Suspense may operate in any situation where there is a lead-up to a big event or dramatic...

-thriller film directed by Terence Young and produced by Mel Ferrer
Mel Ferrer
Mel Ferrer was an American actor, film director and film producer.-Early life:Ferrer was born Melchor Gastón Ferrer in Elberon, New Jersey, of Catalan and Irish descent. His father, Dr. José María Ferrer , was born in Cuba, was an authority on pneumonia and served as chief of staff of St....

. It stars Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn was a British actress and humanitarian. Although modest about her acting ability, Hepburn remains one of the world's most famous actresses of all time, remembered as a film and fashion icon of the twentieth century...

 as a young blind woman, Alan Arkin
Alan Arkin
Alan Wolf Arkin is an American actor, director, musician and singer. He is known for starring in such films as Wait Until Dark, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Catch-22, The In-Laws, Edward Scissorhands, Glengarry Glen Ross, Marley & Me, and...

 as a violent criminal searching for some drugs, and Richard Crenna
Richard Crenna
Richard Donald Crenna was an American motion picture, television, and radio actor and occasional television director. He starred in such motion pictures as The Sand Pebbles, Wait Until Dark, Body Heat, the first three Rambo movies, Hot Shots! Part Deux, and The Flamingo Kid...

 as another criminal, supported by Jack Weston, Julie Herrod, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr.. The screenplay by Robert Carrington and Jane-Howard Carrington is based on the stage play of the same name
Wait Until Dark
Wait Until Dark is a play by Frederick Knott.-Synopsis:Susy Hendrix is a blind Greenwich Village housewife who becomes the target of three con-men searching for the heroin hidden in a doll, which her husband Sam innocently transported from Canada as a favor to a woman who has since been murdered...

 by Frederick Knott
Frederick Knott
Frederick Major Paull Knott was an English playwright, best known for writing the London-based stage thriller Dial M for Murder, which was later filmed in Hollywood by Alfred Hitchcock....

.

Hepburn was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress
Academy Award for Best Actress
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...

 (losing to Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress of film, stage, and television. In a career that spanned 62 years as a leading lady, she was best known for playing strong-willed, sophisticated women in both dramas and comedies...

), and Zimbalist was nominated for a Globe in the supporting category. The film is ranked #55 on AFI's 2001 100 Years…100 Thrills list, and its climax is ranked tenth on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments.

In an effort to duplicate the suspense on screen, movie theaters dimmed their lights to their legal limits, then turned them off one by one until each light on-screen was shattered, resulting in the theater being plunged into complete darkness.

Cast

  • Audrey Hepburn
    Audrey Hepburn
    Audrey Hepburn was a British actress and humanitarian. Although modest about her acting ability, Hepburn remains one of the world's most famous actresses of all time, remembered as a film and fashion icon of the twentieth century...

     as Susy Hendrix, a young woman blinded in a car crash
  • Alan Arkin
    Alan Arkin
    Alan Wolf Arkin is an American actor, director, musician and singer. He is known for starring in such films as Wait Until Dark, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Catch-22, The In-Laws, Edward Scissorhands, Glengarry Glen Ross, Marley & Me, and...

     as Harry Roat, a cold-blooded criminal mastermind
  • Richard Crenna
    Richard Crenna
    Richard Donald Crenna was an American motion picture, television, and radio actor and occasional television director. He starred in such motion pictures as The Sand Pebbles, Wait Until Dark, Body Heat, the first three Rambo movies, Hot Shots! Part Deux, and The Flamingo Kid...

     as Mike Talman, a con artist
  • Jack Weston as Carlino, Talman's partner, an ex-policeman
  • Samantha Jones
    Samantha Jones
    Samantha Jones is the name of:* Samantha Jones * Samantha Jones, British singer* Samantha Jones , a character on the TV show Sex and the City* Sam Jones , a character on the TV show Doctor Who...

     as Lisa, a con artist and neophyte drug smuggler
  • Julie Herrod as Gloria, a girl, Susy's neighbor
  • Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Sam Hendrix, Susy's husband, a professional photographer

Plot

The film opens in a Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

 apartment, where a woman named Lisa (Jones) waits for an old man to sew bags of heroin into the cloth body of an old-fashioned doll. As she leaves the apartment with the doll, we see the man watching her leave, then dialing someone on the phone. Lisa takes the doll with her on an airline flight to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, but when, on disembarking, she sees a man watching her, she becomes worried and gives the doll for safekeeping to a man she'd spoken with on the plane, professional photographer Sam Hendrix (Zimbalist). The man who'd been watching Lisa then roughly escorts her away. Later, when Lisa calls Sam to ask for the doll, Sam and his wife are unable to find it.

Some time afterward, small-time con artist Mike Talman (Crenna) and his partner Carlino (Weston) arrive at the basement apartment where Sam lives with his wife Susy (Hepburn), who is blind. The two men watch until both the apartment's occupants have left, then enter. The con men have an appointment with Lisa, who'd been their partner in crime prior to the recent imprisonment of both, but they are met instead by Harry Roat, Jr. (Arkin), whom the audience recognizes as the man who watched and met Lisa at the airport. After discovering Lisa's body hanging in a garment bag, Talman and Carlino want to make a quick exit, but Roat points out that they have left their fingerprints all over the apartment, while he has worn gloves. Roat is then able to prevail upon the two to help him dispose of Lisa's body--he'd caught her going into business for herself, he explains--and to help him try to find the heroin-stuffed doll.

Later that day, Susy's neighbor leaves for the weekend, and Sam leaves for a business trip the next morning. Once Susy is alone, the criminals begin an elaborate con game
Confidence trick
A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. A confidence artist is an individual working alone or in concert with others who exploits characteristics of the human psyche such as dishonesty and honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility,...

: In order to gain entry into the apartment, Talman poses as a friend of Sam's, Carlino poses as a policeman, and Roat poses first as an old man and then as the man's son. Using first an innocuous story about Sam and the doll, then a darker one implying that Lisa has been murdered and that Sam will be suspected, the men persuade Susy to help them find the doll. Talman gives her the number for the phone booth across the street as his own after falsely warning her of a police car stationed outside.

During this time, Susy has grown suspicious of Carlino and Roat, and Gloria (Herrod), a girl who lives upstairs and is paid by the couple to help Susy with errands, has been going in and out of the apartment, sometimes without Susy's noticing that she is there. After Talman leaves, Gloria sneaks into the apartment carrying the doll, which she stole some time earlier. She tells Susy there is no police car outside, and Susy discovers the doll. Wanting to confirm her suspicions about Carlino and Roat, Susy tells Gloria to go home and watch the phone booth. If a man goes into it, Gloria is to phone Susy, let the phone ring twice, and hang up. Gloria tells Susy she can signal her by banging on the pipes.

On Carlino's next visit, after he calls Roat at the phone booth, Gloria sends Susy the telephone signal, and she sends the signal a second time after Susy calls Talman to tell him she has the doll. Finally realizing that Talman is a criminal, Susy hides the doll. When he walks in with Corlino and Roat following quietly, she tells him the doll is at Sam's studio. The criminals leave after Roat cuts the telephone cord.

When Susy bangs on the pipes, Gloria comes in and Susy sends her to the bus station in a taxi to wait for Sam. When Susy discovers that the telephone cord has been cut, she prepares to defend herself by putting the criminals in the dark along with her, breaking all the bulbs in the apartment's light fixtures. She also pours a chemical into a bowl. When Talman returns, she refuses to cooperate. Talman has spent the most time with Susy and he has come to admire her for her quiet strength and ability to stand up to the three criminals, despite her disability. He admits to her that he and his confederates are part of a criminal plot and that Sam, as Susy suspected, is completely innocent of any involvement, while Roat is a particular danger. Susy needn't worry, though, Talman says, as he has sent Carlino to kill Roat. However, Roat has killed Carlino instead, and, as Talman prepares to leave, pausing to say something to Susy as he stands in the doorway, Roat stabs him in the back.

Intent on acquiring the doll, Roat chains the door shut in the dark apartment, pours gasoline on the floor, and sets a piece of newspaper on fire. A desperate battle follows in which Susy throws the chemical in Roat's face and she forces him to put out the fire. But the battle ends when Roat obtains light by opening the refrigerator, whose door he props open with a rag in the hinge. Susy, weeping, pulls the doll out from its hiding place and hands it to him. While Roat cuts open the doll and gloats over the treasure inside, Susy is able, unnoticed by him, to arm herself with a butcher knife. Roat then announces his intention to rape Susy, but, as he leads her to the bedroom, she manages to stab him in the belly. As she stumbles across the floor toward the kitchen window to scream for help, Roat suddenly leaps out from the darkened bedroom and grabs her ankle. Screaming, Susy wrenches free, but the dying Roat doggedly pursues her, using the knife with which she stabbed him to drag himself across the floor. Susy is at the refrigerator, trying to close its door and thus extinguish its light, unaware of the rag that is preventing its closure. She then gropes for the refrigerator's cord, murmuring desperately, "Where is it?" As the reeling Roat stands with his last strength and staggers toward her with the knife, Susy's scream merges with the sound of a police siren, and the scene switches to the arrival of police cars outside the apartment. When the police enter with Sam and Gloria, Sam finds an unbroken light bulb and we see the room littered with the bodies of Talman and Roat, but no Susy. Finally, as Sam calls out for her, the door of the unplugged refrigerator moves, and Susy emerges from behind it, alive.

Reception

Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther was a journalist and author who was film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His reviews and articles helped shape the careers of actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews, at times, were unnecessarily mean...

 called it a "barefaced melodrama
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...

, without character revelation of any sort, outside of the demonstration of a person with the fortitude to overcome an infirmity"; he liked Hepburn's performance, saying "the sweetness with which Miss Hepburn plays the poignant role, the quickness with which she changes and the skill with which she manifests terror attract sympathy and anxiety to her and give her genuine solidity in the final scenes."

Time magazine said the film had a "better scenario, set and cast" than the play's Broadway production that preceded it, and while "the story is as full of holes as a kitchen colander
Colander
A colander is a bowl-shaped kitchen utensil with holes in it used for draining food such as pasta or rice.The perforated nature of the colander allows liquid to drain through while retaining the solids inside...

", "Hepburn's honest, posture-free performance helps to suspend the audience's disbelief
Suspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief or "willing suspension of disbelief" is a formula for justifying the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literary works of fiction...

" and she is "immensely aided by the heavies: Jack Weston, Richard Crenna, and Alan Arkin....With virtuosity, Hepburn and Arkin collaborate to revive an old theme—The-Helpless-Girl-Against-the-Odds—that has been out of fashion since Dorothy McGuire
Dorothy McGuire
Dorothy Hackett McGuire was an American actress.-Career:Born in Omaha, Nebraska, she began her acting career on the stage at the Omaha Community Playhouse...

 and Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra...

 screamed for help in The Spiral Staircase and Sorry, Wrong Number
Sorry, Wrong Number
Sorry, Wrong Number is a 1948 American suspense film noir directed by Anatole Litvak. It tells the story of a woman who overhears a plot for murder. It stars Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Ann Richards, Wendell Corey, Ed Begley, Leif Erickson and William Conrad.The film was adapted by Lucille...

.

Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

 wrote "Miss Hepburn is perhaps too simple and trusting, and Alan Arkin (as a sadistic killer) is not particularly convincing in an exaggerated performance. But there are some nice, juicy passages of terror (including that famous moment when every adolescent girl in the theater screams), and after a slow start the plot does seduce you."

The film ranked tenth on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments for its riveting climax.

External links

, including an article with a plot summary and behind-the-scene details
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