Wait Until Dark (1967)

[Requested by Jenny Sekwa.]

Or, a climax in search of a film. The last twenty minutes or so of this famed thriller are as fine as anything in the genre, with maybe the best jump scare ever. Plus there's Alan Arkin turning in a strikingly hammy performance as a psycho terrorizing poor blind Audrey Hepburn. However, Hepburn's performance, Oscar-nominated as it is, is wholly uneven -- she swings between believable (i.e. her scenes with Richard Crenna) and stilted. The latter adjective particularly describes much of her work in the film's first half-hour, as she tries to waver between happy, frightened, confident and annoyed, occasionally within the space of a couple lines of dialogue. The overwritten, archly theatrical dialogue she's given doesn't help either -- very few people could deliver, "I'll be the one reading Peter Rabbit in Braille," and have it sound like something a human being could conceivably say. The plot is sharp from a tension-building standpoint but is full of contrivances; I know most thrillers are on some level contrived, but the test of quality is how well the plot convinces me to overlook these stretches, and here I was never convinced. As Roger Ebert pointed out upon the film's initial release, the whole film would have been nullified if only Hepburn had locked her goddamn door. Wait Until Dark is never particularly bad -- it's well-constructed from a technical standpoint, and it leads into a fabulous cat-and-mouse ending, but that doesn't excuse its hackneyed nature. It is, at bottom, sharply made dross.

Grade: C+