More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Wait Until Dark

Well, here's the most irrelevant post you'll see all year. I didn't set out to become a know-it-all on the subject of Wait Until Dark (Warner Bros., 1967) (and there are many other cinephiles out there who know more about the movie than I do), but that's what happens when you end up seeing a movie at least 75 times over 48 years. It's not a classic shocker, like Psycho, but it has a truly creepy performance by Alan Arkin as the psychopath Harry Roat Jr. (“from Scarsdale”) as well as hair-raising final showdown between Arkin and Audrey Hepburn, a sequence critics have favorably compared to the best of Hitchcock. Carrie tried something similar to this movie's Big Moment about 10 years later, and it caught on with other movies and quickly became a cliché. But WUD was the granddaddy of last-minute shrieks.

I saw the film many times with my girlfriend while it was in its initial run (see? I wasn't the only one), then again every time it returned as part of a double bill, usually paired with Cool Hand Luke (distributors did that with a lot of movies back then). Once it became available on VHS and later on DVD, I showed it to countless friends who'd never seen it, and I watched it alone more times than I can count. There has to be a 12-step program for people like me.

Here's the setup: Audrey Hepburn plays Suzy Hendrix, a blind housewife whose husband Sam (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) returns from a business trip with a doll that a woman in the airport asked him to hold onto. The doll is filled with heroin, and Harry Roat Jr. (Alan Arkin), a particularly malevolent psychopath, wants it.  Today I still think he's the most frightening villain I've seen outside of horror movies, and I'm including Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) in Blue Velvet, Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) in Kiss of Death, and so many other great ones.  I guess I'm partial because I more or less know all his lines by heart.

Talman: You want something?
Roat: You, Mr. Talman.  I want you.  And you, too, Sergeant Carlino, I want you, too.  In fact, I want both of you, and I've come here to buy you.

He recruits two other bad guys, Mile Talman (Richard Crenna) and “Sgt.” Carlino (Jack Weston), to help him play out an elaborate charade that will convince Suzy to give them the doll. Let's just say that things don't go as planned, mainly because Suzy is an extremely clever and resourceful woman the three men underestimate.

So here are some random musings on a movie I know way too much about. . . .

This is a bit of trivia I'm especially happy about, because it's a detail that few people (if any) in the history of the planet are likely to know but certain not to care about: The movie takes place in the apartment of a Greenwich Village photographer. The three villains monitor the apartment from their van parked beside a phone booth across the street. The number of the telephone in the booth is 242-4598. In Rear Window 13 years earlier, James Stewart plays a photographer who also lives in the Village. The phone number of the man across the courtyard whom Stewart suspects of murder is 242-5598. Coincidence? You be the judge.

Some critics at the time claimed that Roat's entire charade was unnecessary, but they overlooked the obvious reason for it – the only other occupant in the building that weekend is Gloria, the little girl who lives upstairs. As Roat tells Talman and Carlino just before they go into their act, “There's a little pink kid running around the house – and she wears glasses.” Maybe the critics were ahead of their time: Had this been written today, Roat would have just tortured Suzy and then killed them both.

Gaffe: The bad guys communicate between the apartment (when they're in there with Hepburn) and the van by opening and closing Hepburn's blinds. But at one point, Hepburn tells Talman, whom she trusts, that Roat (in one of two disguises he wore to fool the girl) had played with the blind at one point when it was actually Talman himself. What makes it a gaffe is that Suzy is much too observant to have confused the two, especially since Talman's voice had come from that part of the room.

OK, that might be too nitpicky. Here's a problem that's much more obvious. Roat has murdered Lisa (Samantha Jones), who had brought the doll into the country from Canada to begin with, and who is hanging in a plastic clothing bag in Suzy's bedroom closet. The door is open because Talman left it open when he discovered her. So blind Suzy comes home and bumps into a chair, which she knows perfectly well is in the wrong place. But then she walks through the bedroom and into the closet to grab a scarf without noticing that the closet door is open. Neither Suzy nor Sam would be likely to leave it open when everything else in the apartment is so perfectly situated to accommodate her. It's a detail she would have immediately noticed. Also, Lisa's been in there for a while, so wouldn't Suzy's heightened sense of smell have picked up on it? (I mean, when Suzy walks in, the door's only been open a few minutes.)

The third thing that bothers me is that in that climactic scene, Roat has splashed gasoline all over the apartment, knowing Suzy is deathly afraid of fire. He lights a newspaper and holds it before her face to convince her he's serious. But I kept thinking about that gasoline. Suzy lights an awful lot of matches to keep Roat, whom she's doused in gasoline, at a distance. Wouldn't the place be full of fumes?

OK, and here's another thing: Suzy and Gloria are in Suzy's apartment when Carlino peers in at them through the window. Then he disappears, and we've already been told  he's coming inside to knock on her door. But Suzy and Gloria have this long conversation first, so long that Carlino would have to be blind himself to take that long before knocking. Ever notice that moviemakers like to cheat with time that way? It's like the timers on movie explosives – a bomb might read 1:00 at one moment, then when the camera cuts back to it thirty seconds later, five seconds have passed.  When I was 10 and didn't know there was a reason movies were made this way, the bomb in Fort Knox near the end of Goldfinger drove me nuts.  If that timer had been truly accurate, James bond could have made another sequel before coming back to deactivate it.

In the opening airport scene, when Lisa approaches Sam with the doll, a young Robby Benson walks by in the background tossing a football in the air. Don't blink or you'll miss him. I admit I didn't know this until I read it later, but it's so cool that I had to share it.

Part of what made the casting so effective in 1967 is that Arkin, Crenna, and Weston had been known as comic actors. Arkin got his start in Chicago's Second City and was just coming off of The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming, a cold war comedy that earned him his first Oscar nomination. Crenna became popular playing the goofy high school student in the TV show Our Miss Brooks, starring Eve Arden. Weston was sometimes a heavy, but he'd appeared in 1960's Please Don't Eat the Daisies, a popular domestic comedy later turned into a TV sitcom. Seeing funny men so deadly serious definitely heightened the creep factor.

It reminded me of The Wizard of Oz, where Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, and Jack Haley played Dorothy's friends after having done a lot of a lot of light comedic work. I don't mean that Oz was dramatic, but the trio hadn't been known for doing children's movies, and I remember thinking how witty and sophisticated their lines were (“I hope my strength holds out.” “I hope your tail holds out!”) the first time I saw it. I appreciated how the movie respected me as a kid.  I was too young to realize that they hadn't written the script.

About the stage productions: I actually walked out of one in Seattle during the first intermission. Roat was played by a woman – a heavyset woman with a British accent who wasn't the least bit scary. I couldn't get my brain around this. Then the thought of her leaping out of the bedroom made me remember I needed to be somewhere (anywhere).

Finally, who remembers the gimmick movie theaters used when this movie was first released in 1967? It was a great one, and most theater managers complied with it. During that frightening last scene, Suzy runs from Roat to the one lamp she left on, and he throws his knife at her. She hesitates so she can hear where it hits (hoping it's not her body), then knocks out the light and grabs the knife. At that moment, the screen becomes pitch black and, except for Suzy's matches, remains so for at least a full minute. It's when that light goes out that all the remaining theater lights – particularly the exit lights and those tiny bulbs that illuminate the theater aisles and the aisles seats – go off as well. The audience sits in complete darkness until the movie is over. (I never knew just how much light there was in a theater while a movie was playing.) I can't tell you how effective and unnerving that was. When the memorable Big Moment came, everyone screamed, men and women alike, but I think it was because we all felt so helpless in the dark that the women kept on screaming right up until the end of the scene a couple of minutes later.

When the movie returned in subsequent rereleases and theater managers no longer felt obligated to turn the lights out, people screamed, but only for that moment. (When I played it for friends at home, I would turn off the living room light and freak them out.)

 

(One thing about that scene made quite an impression on me back when I was so impressionable: As I mentioned above, Suzy lights matches in the dark to keep Roat at bay because she's doused him in gasoline. To keep track of where he is, she tells him to pick up her cane and tap it on the floor so she knows where he is. So here you have a blind woman lighting matches in the dark and a sighted man tapping a cane on the floor. At 14, I thought that was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. I think it's still pretty ingenious.)