Wait Until Dark Review (1967)
Director: Terence Young
Writer: Robert Carrington, Jane-Howard Carrington (screenplay), based on the play by Frederick Knott
Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Jack Weston, Julie Herrod
Release Date: October 26, 1967

Wait Until Dark is my number one Audrey Hepburn film and the top of the list in my ongoing Audrey Hepburn rewatch series. It is also one of my absolute favorite movies of all time, full stop. Not just one of my favorite Hepburn films. Not just one of my favorite thrillers. One of my favorite movies, period, in a lifetime of watching them. If you have read this far into the rewatch series and haven’t seen this one yet, stop reading right now and go watch it first. Everything else can wait.

I want to start with something that genuinely frustrates me. When people talk about Audrey Hepburn, this film almost never comes up first. You get Breakfast at Tiffany’s. You get Roman Holiday(which I get, it’s an exalted classic). You get My Fair Lady. Those are all great films, and I have reviewed most of them as part of this series. But Wait Until Dark is the best film she ever made, and the performance she gives in it is the best thing she ever did on screen, and it doesn’t get anywhere close to the conversation it deserves.

The setup is deceptively simple. Susy Hendrix (Hepburn) is a recently blinded woman living in a basement apartment in Greenwich Village with her photographer husband Sam (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.). While Sam is away on a trip, three men show up looking for a heroin-filled doll that was smuggled into the country and ended up in their apartment by accident. The men (led by the calculating Roat (Alan Arkin) with two petty criminals named Carlino and Talman (Richard Crenna and Jack Weston) along for the job) need to find the doll without tipping Susy off to what they are actually after. What follows is one of the great cat-and-mouse setups in film history, played out almost entirely inside a single apartment.

The confined space isn’t a limitation. It’s the whole point. Terence Young builds pressure in that apartment the way you build pressure in a sealed container; slowly, deliberately, until the walls feel like they are actually closing in. By the time the third act arrives, you are completely locked in with Susy, and when she starts to understand exactly how much danger she is in, you feel every bit of it. There is a sequence toward the end of this film that is as effective as anything I have ever seen in a thriller. I’m not going to describe it. You need to experience it without knowing it is coming.

What Hepburn does here is remarkable. Susy is not a passive victim waiting to be rescued. She is intelligent, resourceful, and determined, and as the film goes on and she starts to piece together what is actually happening, she begins using her blindness as a tool rather than treating it as a handicap. The physicality of the performance is extraordinary; Hepburn spent time learning how blind people actually navigate their environments, and it shows in every movement, every gesture, every moment where she reaches for something without looking. This is not an actress playing blind. This is an actress who understood that the role required her to rebuild her entire physical vocabulary from scratch, and she did exactly that.

She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for this performance. She lost to Katharine Hepburn for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which is not an unreasonable winner on its own terms, but Audrey’s performance here is the better one, by far. After Wait Until Dark wrapped she stepped away from film acting for nearly a decade. It was the right film to leave on. Everything she was capable of is in this one: the intelligence, the commitment, the emotional range, the physical discipline, all of it. If someone asked me to pick a single performance that showed what Audrey Hepburn could actually do as an actress, this is the one I would choose every time.

Alan Arkin is the other essential piece of this film, and he doesn’t get talked about enough either. Roat is one of the great screen villains, and what makes him work is that Arkin never plays him as a straightforward heavy. He is calm, almost polite, and there is an underlying unpredictability to him that makes every scene he is in feel dangerous. You never quite know what he is going to do next, and that uncertainty is scarier than any amount of conventional menace. Richard Crenna and Jack Weston are both excellent in supporting roles, but this is Arkin’s film as much as it is Hepburn’s, and the two of them together create something that neither one could have created alone.

I could keep going. I could talk about the score, which is perfectly calibrated. I could talk about the way Young uses light and shadow (especially light and shadow), for reasons that will be obvious once you have seen it. I could talk about the way the screenplay, adapted from Frederick Knott’s stage play, constructs its plot with the kind of precision that reveals more with every rewatch. But the most important thing I can tell you about Wait Until Dark is that it works. It works as a thriller. It works as a showcase for two extraordinary performances. It works as a piece of filmmaking that understood exactly what it was trying to do and executed it without a wasted moment.

Severely underappreciated. One of the best films ever made. This one definitely belongs on your Blu-ray/DVD shelf.

Wait Until Dark gets a five out of five: EXALTED.

If you enjoy this one, you might also like to check out my review Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, or another Audrey Hepburn exalted classic, Roman Holiday. Or click here to check out more movie reviews.

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