Wait Until Dark

Wait Until Dark works. When the time comes, you jump, or scream, or do both. That's what the picture wants you to do and that's what you do.

Why it works seems largely a matter of pacing and acting. The script, taken from Frederick Knott's most recent Broadway thriller, wouldn't be worth a damn if badly played. Although it is relentlessly logical, it starts from an incredible premise--that a blind housewife, alone and confronted by a maniac and two criminal associates, would engage them in a battle of wits instead of just dissolving.

The pacing is director Terence Young's. Young did three of the James Bond films, yet this is a new field for him. The Bond films employed un-subtle gadgetry and exotic locales to produce the doses of excitement. In Wait Until Dark, Young is largely confined to a single set and must have the audience identify with the surface realism of the situation. Young succeeds well in meeting the challenge. The pauses and rushes are well thought out; the audience, which in this kind of film is usually skeptical, can content itself that it would react similarly. The final shock is a brilliant exercise in audience manipulation.

Audrey Hepburn as the housewife is totally appealing. Her physical frailty is a genuine asset here, and she deserves an award just for keeping her "blind" eyes looking in the proper direction throughout. The real acting coup is Alan Arkin's. As a homocidal-sex maniac, Arkin is bone-chilling. His use of sunglasses, an eventual plot element, helps prevent associating him with the lovable sailor of The Russians Are Coming.

In the three other major roles, Richard Crenna and Jack Weston as the other two menacers, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Miss Hepburn's husband, are fine. It is interesting to speculate that Crenna and Zimbalist could almost have reversed roles without altering the film. But then again, Efrem Zimbalist as a menace? Who would believe it.