Wait until Dark

Director: Terence Young

Written by: Frederick Knott (play); Robert Howard-Carrington (screenplay) & Jane Howard-Carrington

Cast: Audrey Hepburn as Susy Hendrix
Alan Arkin as Harry Roat
Richard Crenna as Mike Talman
Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Sam Hendrix
Jack Weston as Carlino

Runtime: 107 mins

Language: English

Plot: Susie's husband is asked to hold a doll for a woman as they get off an airplane. She disappears. Mike and Carlino are small time hoods who find the woman's body in Susie's apartment, placed there by her partner, Harry Rote. Susie's blindness is the key to them searching the apartment for the doll that contains smuggled drugs. Mike pretends to be an old friend of Susie's husband while her husband is away and together the crooks invent a story of a police investigation of her husband that only the discovery of the now missing doll can save him from. Rote is a killer, and his stalking of Susie becomes more and more obvious as the story unfolds, leaving us with the question, how does a blind woman defend herself?

Summary written by John Vogel

Imdb

In Wait Until Dark, an experienced Audrey Hepburn successfully moves from her more typical impish parts to the difficult and challenging role of interpreting a blind woman, whose privacy and safety is invaded and threatened by the irruption of impostors into her basement flat. Hepburn, unconditioned protagonist of this film, proves here to be a mature and adaptable actress splendidly expressing fears, innate optimism, love and gratitude towards her husband and an acute intuition which makes her a strongly independent woman even though deprived of the most attractive sense: the sight.

Set within a two-dimensional arena: Susy's flat, Wait Until Dark was originally a theatre piece subsequently transposed into the big screen. Her confident movements within the confined space of her flat, her penetrating looks and calibrated voice were the core elements of her dramatic acting. As pointed out elsewhere, films and live performances ought to be considered as different means of expression, endowed with different potentials, aiming at different objectives and emphasising different aspects of the performance arts. However, in this occasion the cinematic version appeared to me like a *filmed theatre performance*. I bet her execution would have changed little, had she performed on a stage instead that behind a camera.

Again, a portrait of a great character to reflect the great woman she was in real life.