Wait Until Dark (film)

For the 1966 play, see Wait Until Dark.

Wait Until Dark
1967 theatrical poster
Directed by	Terence Young
Produced by	Mel Ferrer
Screenplay by	Robert Carrington Jane-Howard Carrington
Story by	Frederick Knott
Starring	Audrey Hepburn Alan Arkin Richard Crenna
Studio	Warner Bros.-Seven Arts
Release date(s)	October 26, 1967
Running time	108 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$4 million
Box office	$17,550,741 $7,900,000 (rentals)

Wait Until Dark (1967) is a suspense-thriller film directed by Terence Young and produced by Mel Ferrer. It stars Audrey Hepburn as a young blind woman, Alan Arkin as a violent criminal searching for some drugs, and Richard Crenna 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 by Frederick Knott.

Hepburn was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress (losing to Katharine Hepburn), and Zimbalist was nominated for a Golden 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.^{[citation needed]}

Cast

• Audrey Hepburn as Susy Hendrix, a young woman blinded in a car crash
• Alan Arkin as Harry Roat, a cold-blooded criminal mastermind who is always in control.
• Richard Crenna as Mike Talman, a con artist
• Jack Weston as Carlino, Talman's partner, an ex-policeman
• Samantha Jones 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 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, 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: 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 large kitchen knife. Roat then pushes Susy towards the bedroom, making an ambiguous threat as to his intentions. As he pushes her forward, Susy suddenly turns and stabs Roat in the belly. She flees his grasp, but is unable to escape through the chained door. She stumbles across the floor toward the kitchen window to scream for help, but Roat unexpectedly 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 called it a "barefaced melodrama, 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", "Hepburn's honest, posture-free performance helps to suspend the audience's disbelief" 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 and Barbara Stanwyck screamed for help in The Spiral Staircase and Sorry, Wrong Number.

Roger Ebert 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.

Awards and honors

American Film Institute recognition

• 2001 – AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills – #55

External links

• Wait Until Dark at the Internet Movie Database
• Wait Until Dark at the TCM Movie Database, including an article with a plot summary and behind-the-scene details
• Wait Until Dark at AllRovi