Wait Until Dark

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

This week is shaping up as a good one, with a 2nd great movie I can blog about. Sweet.

Wait Until Dark is a film, as a fan of the horror cinema, I've been meaning to see for a long, long time. It's a 60's horror/suspense dealie, based on a stage play. It's about three criminals who believe that heroin is stashed in an apartment, unbeknownst to the inhabitants. The twist is, the inhabitant is a blind woman(played by Audrey Hepburn), so they concoct an elaborate con to get themselves in the apartment to look around without raising her suspicions about their motives.
Of course, Hepburn is more observant than they realize, and as she slowly starts to piece things together, the criminals' actions become more sinister.

This movie starts out more like a crime movie, and only slowly becomes a horror film as it moves along. And it's got to be one of the best shifts in tone I've ever seen in a movie, really ratcheting up the tension more and more until a truly fucking awesome last 15 minutes or so.

Hepburn seems like a weird choice for such dark material, but it turns out to be a brilliant idea. Her charm and lovableness, and the character's vulnerability seem out of place in a horror movie, but it makes us care about her more, and hence fear for her more as shit starts to hit the fan.

The blindness angle is an old standard in horror movies, and has been exploited a million times before and since. (See every Italian horror movie ever). Wait Until Dark may use it better than any other movie I've ever seen. First, it works as a gimmick to show how an otherwise intelligent woman can be manipulated. Later, to build suspense when she has no idea what the hell is going on around her.

And at the end, she breaks all the lights in her apartment, and holy shit, now the playing field is level. This last chunk of the movie is the best, when she faces off against Alan Arkin in the pitch black apartment. There is a great back and forth, as he tries to find light sources, and she tries to use sound to find him. I don't want to go into too much detail, but there is one great set piece after another, as they try to one-up each other.


Alan Arkin makes for a great villain. He is a little weird and goofy, wears these stupid beatnik glasses, and tries to project incompetence. But we realize that his oddness and incompetence is maybe a put-on to get everyone to drop their guards. You get the sense that he's a lot more dangerous than he wants you to realized. Still, I was surprised at how small his role is. His scenes are mainly confined to the first and last 15 minutes. When he shows up in the middle, it's brief and he's often in disguise. Much more prominent is Richard Crenna, as one of the other con men, but he gets billed after Arkin in the credits. I think that's probably because his role, while larger, is less memorable.

Let's wrap this up: Wait Until Dark is a bonafide classic, a must-see for any fan of thrillers and horror films. Might have to pick me up a copy one day.