Classic Movie Review Wait Until Dark

Wait Until Dark (1968) 

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Robert Carrington, Jane Howard-Carrington

Starring Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. 

Release Date October 26th, 1967 

Published 

Wait Until Dark opens on a close up of a piece of sill being surgically sliced. A pull back reveals a man opening up the back of a doll of some sort, a plush baby doll, filled with cotton. A woman stands near the man, fretting. Her name is Lisa (Samantha Jones), and she has a plane to catch. She's waiting on the elderly man to open the doll, place several kilos of Heroin inside the doll, and sew it back up. The doll is our MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian thing that everyone in the plot wants, has, or unknowingly possesses. As Lisa rushes from the elderly man's apartment with the Heroin filled dolly, he watches her through the window as she rushes into a cab. 

Director Terence Young was well into a lengthy, prolific, and not particularly memorable directorial career when he made Wait Until Dark. His best-known works were three of Sean Connery's James Bond movies, Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Thunderball. If you enjoyed James Bond, you likely enjoyed those movies. Beyond his Bond work however, Young wasn't particularly noted. He did direct movies for 40 years, starting in 1948 and ending in 1988 but by 1988 he was working with the likes of Franco Nero rather than people like Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. 

Young is a utility player to borrow a baseball term. Plug him in on a day when someone needs a rest, and he will play the field well and perhaps not be an automatic strikeout at the plate. He started during the days of studio pictures when guys like him could manage a few movies per year, rarely pausing between films, not particularly worried about the post-production part of the movie. This might sound mean-spirited, like I am diminishing a man who worked in Hollywood for literally 40 years as a director, but I assure that is not my intent. Indeed, one of my favorite directors of all time was very similar to Terence Young. Like Young, Michael Curtiz was a studio director. He knocked out movies on time and on budget and bounced from one project to the next unconcerned about what the studio did with the movie. Michael Curtiz made Casablanca under that system. 

Terence Young doesn't exactly have a Casablanca on his resume but, Wait Until Dark is a good flick. Written by Robert and Jane Carrington, adapting a play written by Frederick Knox, Wait Until Dark follows that heroin filled doll from Canada to New York City where Lisa passes the doll off to an unwitting accomplice, Sam Hendrix (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.). Sam is a photographer headed home to his lovely wife, Susy (Audrey Hepburn), who happens to be blind. Naturally, there are dangerous men who want that doll for what is inside of it. These include a pair of con artists, Talman (Richard Crenna) and Carlino (Jack Weston). And working with and against the con artists is the most dangerous man of all, Harry Roat (Alan Arkin). 

Structurally, we've reached the fun and games portion of the movie. With Sam sent off to a photography assignment in New Jersey, secretly arranged by Harry Roat, Susy is home alone and vulnerable. The plan has Roat manipulating his new accomplices Talman and Carlino to get inside Susy's apartment and convince her to give them the doll. This involves convincing her that Sam is involved in the death of Lisa, the woman who brought the doll to New York and gave it to Sam. She was killed off screen by Roat who then framed Talman and Carlino in order to blackmail them to help him roust Susy. Unfortunately, Susy has no idea where the doll is. She knows Sam brought it home but where it went from there, she has no idea. 

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal 

Classic Movie Review Rosemary's Baby

Rosemary's Baby (1968) 

Directed by Roman Polanski 

Written by Roman Polanski 

Starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy

Release Date June 12th, 1968 

Published September 10th, 2017 

Rosemary’s Baby is one of the most sneakily ingenious psycho-dramas ever made. Director Roman Polanski, a quite correctly demonized figure today, was a masterful director in his day. In Rosemary’s Baby, arguably his finest film, Polanski uses film technique and his unique sensibilities to take seemingly normal and mundane things and use our perceptions of those things against us. The most obvious and blatant of these mundane things is using the elderly as the film’s villains, especially the grandmotherly Ruth Gordon.

Rosemary’s Baby is set in New York in 1965. Rosemary is an aspiring housewife to Guy (John Cassavetes), an actor looking for a big break on Broadway while making a living as an actor in commercials. Rosemary and Guy have just landed a beautiful new apartment in a venerated old building with a very creepy history. According to a friend, the building was the home to several disturbing deaths and rumors of occult activities.

This, however, does not put off Rosemary, at least not until she meets the neighbors. Minnie (Gordon) and her husband Roman (Sidney Blackmer) seem like the doting grandparent types by the look of them but when they begin to force their way further and further into the lives of Rosemary and Guy we completely understand why Rosemary feels as uncomfortable as she is. Roman, by some luck, is a producer and when Guy begins spending more time with him his career begins to turn around.

Meanwhile, the couple is trying to get pregnant and here is where Polanski pulls off a really neat and disturbing trick. In what seems as if it could be a dream, Rosemary finds herself slowly beginning to pass out and dream that she is on a yacht with friendly people having a nice time. However, the edges of her dream seem to be tearing away and a bizarre sort of reality is seeping into the fantasy, a dark disturbing reality that finds a nude Rosemary tied to a bed in a room full of nude old people and her freaked out husband. She is then raped by the Devil himself, a cloven hooved demon who climbs on top of her while the old folks chant creepily.

Find my full length review in the Horror Community on Vocal.