Wait Until Dark (1967).

There have been films which act as turning points in the history of cinema.  It doesn't happen often, yet when it does occur, most audiences are quick to notice.  Perhaps one of the biggest movies to break new ground, and bring a different sensibility and outlook to the big screen happened a long time ago, in 1960.  That's the year Alfred Hitchcock debuted a neat and concise little thriller known as Psycho on the big screen.  The way it worked was down to a number of factors.  On the one hand, a director lauded for his work on such high concept films like Notorious, Rear Window, and North By Northwest was starting to get fed up with the way audiences had begun to pigeonhole his efforts as the work of a genre artist.  Hitch never minded working in what might be termed the Gothic Noir field.  From pretty much the first to last, it's what was solid for him.  It was the one type of story which allowed him to keep his enthusiasm for filmmaking alive and well.  What bothered him was that he didn't like the way tastemakers and critics were trying to fence him in, and section his work off from what they were ready to label as the more legitimate forms of storytelling.  It's a criticism as old as the 19th century, or thereabouts.  It's also one that the Horror genre in particular has had to grapple with due to its constant reputation as the black sheep of the popular genres.  It seems to have been an awareness of this reputation which led Hitch toward a desire to see if he could take the pulpiest concept and material associated with the genre, and make Art out of it.

There's a hell of a lot more to that story worth telling someday, yet for the purpose of this article, that's one of the basic building block motivations behind the creation of Psycho.  I think the fact that audiences are still talking about that film all these years is a testament to just how well Hitchcock has been able to achieve his goals.  The story of Norman Bates represents a film which was able not just to break itself out the pulp ghetto to which other works like it had been consigned.  It also functions as one of those tales whose impact turns out to be so big that it kind of rewrites the rules for how films in general, and stories like itself in particular were made and viewed.  When I call Psycho a turning point, there's no real exaggeration in that statement.  Nor am I at all alone in making such a judgement call.  It's a film that's been described as a turning point in Hollywood as a whole.  A good way to describe it is to call it a story which functions as both a beginning, and an ending.  On the one hand, it marked the end of the sort of classical approach to filmmaking which was something of the high standard during Tinseltown's Golden Age.  By proving that it was possible to take a fundamentally B-level Drive-In premise, and give the whole thing a solid A-list treatment, Hitchcock proved not only that Horror has its place, it can also make a valid claim for itself as a legitimate form of Art.  The fact he was able to succeed in this endeavor marks Psycho as a cinematic beginning on a number of various levels.

For the purposes of this review, the one aspect of the film that needs to be singled out is also the one most audiences are still familiar with.  I've heard Psycho described as the first Slasher flick, and there's plenty of good reason for that assessment.  It's not because there's any originality to had in terms of the story proper.  The figure of the deadly serial killer who lurks in the shadows, just out of the line of sight, was already something of a standard trope by the mid to late 1930s.  A good example of just how old the idea is as a creative concept can be gauged by going back to two films which share the same antagonist.  One is a legit forgotten B flick known as House of Horror, and the other is a Basil Rathbone, Sherlock Holmes vehicle called Pearl of Death.  Both films hail from the year 1946, and each features the same character as the antagonist.  He was this homicidal maniac known as the Creeper (no, not that one) and I guess the best way to describe him is that he was the closest anyone ever got to being the Freddy Krueger of his era.  The fact that no one remembers this cinematic psycho slasher today stands as a testament to just how little of an impact the Creeper left on filmgoers, even back during the 40s.  

What allowed Norman Bates to run, where the Creeper could only walk (and then not even that far), is down to more than just Hitchcock's much touted genius as a visual stylist.  While a lot of his greatness with the camera is on display, viewers looking for anything like an actual visual feast might just come away disappointed.  The director's handling of the lens on the Perkins-Leigh vehicle is so controlled it almost has to be labeled as an example of the Spartan Thriller.  To be bothered by this particular quality is to mistake one single tree for the entire forest.  The real engine that allowed Psycho not just to run, but also discover a whole new stratosphere, lies not in the quality of its images, but rather in the script.  It's story is one that remembers that Horror can have a sophistication all its own, and Hitchcock must have been the kind of perceptive reader who was able to recognize aspects and ideas like this, because he took what is basically schlock, and made it into something worthy of being called a museum piece.  There's one particular aspect to the story of the various goings on in and around the infamous Bates Motel that adds fuel to the idea of its being a major turning point.  It marks the first time that the idea of the Stalker Slasher was, not just put front and center as the main character of such a story (and that is one of the great hidden conceits of the picture; its not that the protagonist is killed off halfway through the story, its that when we meet the real main lead, we don't recognize him as such at first).  In addition, the film also marks the first time that the Slasher is marked with a specific, recognizable, tonal quality.

I've said that Norman Bates is not a new characterization in the strictest sense.  The figure of the Slasher has been around far longer than the advent of film.  Going by a strict sense of chronology, the first modern character to codify the trope is the culprit of Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue".  Keeping this fact in mind means that one of the ironies of Norman is that he represents a leap forward in the genre by looking back to his Gothic roots.  If the peculiar Mr. Bates now functions as the first official Slasher in cinema history, then part of the reason for that is because he represents an even greater sense of artistic transition than that of going from the Old to the New Hollywood.  He's the first time the villain of what is ostensibly a crime thriller was ever painted in shades that designate him as the first major Horror figure of Hollywood's New Wave.  This is an achievement for which Hitchcock and his main star, Anthony Perkins, tend to be the ones to receive all the accolades for.  It's pretty easy to see why this is the case.  Hitch and his film were the first out of the starting gate.  Hence, they got to be the ones to break new-old-ground.  It's a simple case of "To the victor go the spoils" so far as critics and audiences are concerned.  Now, to be fair, all of that praise is more than well earned.  What I don't believe it should do is blind genre fans and movie history buffs to the fact that Psycho counts as merely the first (albeit very major) stepping stone in a continuing line of cinematic development.  Norman was just the first modern Slasher of the movies.  There were others who followed after in his train.

This is also a generally acknowledged fact.  Where even the most die-hard fans tend to go wrong is the belief that there's this gap of a whole decade between the breakout Hitchcock performance, followed by Tobe Hooper's updating of the concept way later with 1973's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, followed up a few short years after with 1978's Halloween.  Again, to be fair, there is a clear line of descent between Norm Bates, Leatherface, and Mike Myers than can never be ignored.  What I think most cinema buffs have lost sight of, however, is the awareness that there was at least one more major film which ended up making a contribution to the development of the modern Slasher Horror movie.  Unlike the efforts of Hitchcock, Tobe Hooper, and John Carpenter, however, this is one crucial piece of film trivia which has managed to get lost in the shuffle.  If I had to give a reason for why this is the case, then perhaps a line of dialogue from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe offers the best explanation.  "One can't mind everything at once", and that seems to be what's happened here with the film under discussion today.  All of which is to say that there is this one movie in particular which has been overlooked in the development of the modern Horror film.  Much like Psycho, this also serves as something of a snapshot of the modern Horror genre in a moment of transition.  This makes it well worth a look at in terms of its meaning for the format as we know it today.  It an interesting, overlooked film called Wait Until Dark.

The Story.  

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Lisa (Audrey Hepburn).  Who was she?  Well, if I'm being honest, the answer would have to be, "No one special".  Just another face in the crowd, like you or me.  She'd probably think of herself in the same way.  At least that's how she might have seen herself if she could do something so simple as look in a mirror, or be able to catch even a fleeting glimpse of what a crowd looks like anymore.  Lisa hasn't been able to take a good look at anything for a while now.  She used to be able to do just that, like most everyone else.  Now she doesn't, or can't if you want the brutal and honest truth about it.  The way things changed was pretty simple.  There was a car crash.  The details on that whole point are sketchy.  Though if I had to take a best guess estimate, then it wouldn't surprise me to learn the guy behind the wheel of the other car was the type who could have failed a breathalyzer test once the dust had cleared; if he even survived, that is.  That's another aspect of the case I neither know nor can find out about.  All I can tell you with any degree of certainty is that this other's guy's car rammed into Lisa's head-on.  The details are sketchy here, yet Lisa's head must received just the right sort of knocks to all the right parts of her occipital lobe, the part responsible for allowing us to see what's happening around us.  Their must have been just the right amount of damage received in the accident.  Because when everything had settled and the cars had finished totaling one another, whether the other guy made it or not, Lisa was able to crawl from the wreckage, and she was able to keep her face intact, along with the use of both legs.

There was one crucial aspect of her life which had changed forever that day, though.  Lisa woke up on the morning of her accident with the ability to see the world around her as clearly as the vast majority of the population.  By the time she finally allowed herself to fall asleep later that same night in a hospital recovery ward, she couldn't have told you right from left.  The traffic accident left her blind as the proverbial bat.  "We know not the hours that will change our lives".  I think that's a Proverb, somewhere.  Though I can't be sure.  Whatever the case, if it ain't in the Book, it might as well be so far as Lisa was concerned.  It sure as hell summed up her predicament in the moment, that's for damn sure.  So, there she was.  A newly minted blind girl in a fresh and unexpected world of darkness.  Not gonna lie.  It got pretty bad there for a while during those first few years.  I'll spare all the heartbreaking details.  Though I will say that it got bad enough where at one point during a mid-day rush hour, Lisa lost all control and just froze, right there on the spot, while all around her the usual slate of New York traffic let their opinions about her be known, and the general sentiment didn't amount to anything like "Happy Birthday".  I can't tell you what the worst case scenario of that moment would have been like.  That's because it never happened.  Instead, what did occur was that a passing Samaritan (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) lived up to the title.  One minute the entire universe was all black, rushing noise.  The next someone was taking her hand, and gently guiding Lisa to the safety of the street corner.  He told her his name was Sam.

She must have thanked him, even as just a matter of course, as these things go.  However, the final results of this brief encounter seem to have gone beyond the regular goodwill gesture.  Sam started out by performing no more than a simple act of kindness.  That one gesture seems to have lead to another, and before either party knew it, he and Lisa were married.  I don't have a clue how "convenient" that must sound to the rest of us.  All I know is that it appears to have been genuine so far as both of them were concerned.  It also doesn't hurt that if you were to meet Lisa in person, you'd know right away that she's the kind of girl you want to rally around and protect.  Sam was able to be that guardian for her.  At the same time, there was this further admirable quality to the Samaritan.  He wasn't about to get in the way of Lisa maintaining her own independence.  Even when they were dating, he took every care he could to make sure that Lisa was able to function on her own.  It was still a bit of a struggle, and yet with a bit of help from her husband, Lisa began to find her footing in her strange, yet loving, new life.

Then, one day, Harry entered the picture.  Meet Harry Roat Jr. “from Scarsdale”.  He’s a professional courier/hitman of sorts, and his latest escapade involves hunting down a few kilos of heroine stashed away in a musical doll.  Through some mix-up the doll wound up in the possession of Lisa’s husband, who has brought it home, and has now misplaced it.  This makes Harry very unhappy.  Now, after successfully manipulating her husband out of the way, Harry is left alone with Lisa in her tiny apartment, and he is determined to find that doll, whatever it takes.     

Conclusion: A Great Film, and the Perfect Snapshot of a Genre in Transition.

It was Stephen King who first brought this movie to my attention.  It's not an isolated incident, either, by the way.  It's something he's done on more than one occasion.  For a brief span of time time, he made something of a habit out of it.  This was back when the author of Misery and Salem's Lot had enough of a reach to allow himself a semi-regular column in Entertainment Weekly during the Twenty-Tens.  I don't know how much clout a recommendation from King carries these days.  Nor am I aware of his thoughts on such matters carrying much in the way of influence with most audiences.  That may be something of a shame, yet whatever the case, it was something he said in the pages of Danse Macabre, a rare, non-fiction examination of the Horror genre, that brought this film to my attention.  He didn't raise an awareness of this now forgotten piece of cinema history in isolation, either.  Instead, King discusses Wait Until Dark as a partial demonstration of a specific context of the Tale of Fright.  I'd like to let his words set the context for this review, because even if he lacks the cultural clout that he once did, I'd argue that King is able to grant his audience the proper aesthetic frame of mind when it comes to gaining an accurate read on a story such as this.  With that in mind, here is the context of the movie.

For King, a film like Wait Until Dark is an example of the kind of mood that "the best films of mythic “fairy-tale horror” summon up in us, and it-also suggests that, below the level of simple aggression and simple morbidity, there is a final level where the horror movie does its most powerful work. And that is well for us, because without more, the human imagination would be a poor, degraded thing, in need of no more in the way of horror than such things as Last House on the Left and Friday the 13th. The horror movie is planning to harm us, all right, and that is exactly why it is lurking here in the very darkest part of the forest. At this most basic level, the horror film isn’t fooling around: it wants to get you.  Once it has reduced you to a level of childlike expectation and point of view, it will begin playing one or more of a very few simple harmonic melodies—the greatest limitation (and therefore the greatest challenge) of the horror form is its very strictness. The things that really scare people on a gut level can be reduced like fractions to an irreducible handful. And when that has finally happened, analyses such as those I’ve given in the fore¬ going pages become impossible... and even if analysis were possible, it would be irrelevant. One can point out effect, and that must be the end of the matter. To try and go any further is as useless as trying to divide a prime number by two and come out even.

"But effect may be enough; there are films, like Browning’s Freaks, that have the power to reduce us to jelly, to make us mutter (or whimper) to ourselves, “Please let it stop”; they are those films which hold their spell over us in spite of all we can do, even including the recitation of that most magic spell-breaking incantation: “It’s only a movie.” And they can all be invoked with that wonderful fairy-tale door- opener, “Once upon a time (187-88)".  I'd argue this is a valid framework to keep in mind as we go along.  I'd rate it as of the highest quality, in fact, that there's really only one other element to add in terms of a proper understanding of this movie's context.  This has to do with its place in the history of the Horror genre, and its status as an unrecognized and underrated hinge or turning point in the medium of Fright.  I started this article out by conjuring up the long shadow cast by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, and in particular, his film groundbreaking work on Psycho.  I mentioned that picture's reputation as a game-changer.  Something that was able to shake up the established rules of what you could get away with in this kind of movie in a way that had never quite been done before.  Rather, let's say that if the kind of violence on display in the Bates Motel saga was always a functioning part of the genre as a whole, even up till then, it still fell to Hitch to be the one to bring the visceral level of those moments of attack up to the kind of level which we now recognize as our modern standard of Terror.

The effect of the entire Shower Sequence, for instance, has left enough of an impact to warrant its own documentary, dedicated just to that one scene alone.  What a film like Wait Until Dark does is build upon the foundations that Hitch was able to set up, and then take it a step further.  At its most basic level, this is a story that takes the parameters of a film like Psycho, and then runs further on with it.  This is something that can be easily figured out from a simple look at the premise.  The story itself is best described as the Slasher Film equivalent of the Locked Room Mystery.  Perhaps a better way to describe it is to claim that it shares something in common with films like Night of the Living Dead, or John Carpenter's The Thing.  All three are about protagonists barricaded into a confined space, and then left to their own devices in terms of how to fend off the Horrors waiting either outside, or else lurking somewhere within the shadows.  What makes a premise like this such a durable one to work with is down to the ease with which it's possible to generate suspense in the audience.  The basic idea of having to fend off some kind of menace in an essentially closed setting is one of those notions that can be a Horror writer or filmmaker's dream come true, if they know how to handle this kind of material well enough, that is.  That seems to have been the case with the story director Terence Young has to tell.

Wait Until Dark got its start as a work of the theater stage, rather than the movie screen.  It all began with an idea from a now obscure author known as Frederick Knott.  History recalls his name for mostly two reasons now.  One of them is a collaboration he did with Alfred Hitchcock on a film called Dial M for Murder.  The other is the picture up for review here.  Beyond this, there is very little or much to go on.  It's not helped by the fact that by all accounts, Knott was a quiet, retiring sort of fellow.  One of those creative types with only a glancing sort of attachment to their talent.  The overall impression is of someone who would have always felt more at home sequestered away in the corner of a library somewhere, rather than pounding away at the typewriters keys, answering the call of the Muse.  Wait Until Dark seems to have been one of the last few times Knott ever bothered to engage with his creative side.  Not long after, he retired peacefully from showbiz, feeling he'd made enough on the residuals from all the paychecks he collected from writing for the stage, or else as one of the major, in-demand screenwriters of Hollywood's Silver Age.  In a way' it's fitting to learn that one of his last efforts mirrors his start in the cinematic arts.  Much like with Dial M for Murder, Wait Until Dark saw its debut as a theater play, originally being penned somewhere in and around the early to mid-1960s.  Its first performance was at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in February of 1966, where it went on to become something of the surprise sleeper hit of the time.  It caught the attention of Hollywood as well.

At some point, producer Mel Ferrer caught news of Knott's playscript , and came away convinced that it could be a decent enough success as a screen adaptation.  So he contacted Knott about a film deal, and the picture soon went into production from there, having its cinematic debut in Oct. of 1967.  Looking back now, there is something fitting in learning that the creator of the story at the heart of this film was also someone who had worked with Hitchcock in the past.  Perhaps that's because Wait Until Dark is a film where the all the best lessons from the Master of Suspense seeped into its cinematic DNA.  What makes this picture hold its own in terms of the artistry from the director its obviously drawing upon is that it's not content to be a clone of someone else's formula for success.  Nor is the director Terence Young, or its screenwriter Robert Carrington, under the illusion that the way to "honor" your sources is to deconstruct or "subvert" them.  Instead, Knott and his cinematic collaborators know that the best tribute to the techniques of the Master of Suspense is best served by just one, single strategy.  You find all the right or legit ways possible from which to build off of your Inspiration.  It's an obvious creative choice for any authentic intelligence working behind the camera.  Though there is the risk that such decision making can appear so subtle that most audiences fail to take notice of it, and that's a flaw.

It's a mistake on our part because it doesn't quite do full justice to a work of sophistication if and when we're lucky enough to run across it.  This, I would argue, is the case with Knott and Young's film.  When I say that the playwright, the director, and the screenwriter have all managed to take what they've learned from the maker of Psycho and build upon it, I'm not just being serious, I'm also describing a number of specific narrative strategies that manage to play out like a fine tuned symphony from start to finish.  The best part is the way the melody has of sneaking up on you in ways you might not have expected, yet still manage to maintain a sense of fair play, and hence of Artistic, storytelling Truth.  The way the film's strategy works is to start by dropping its audience into the middle of what appears to be the typical Hitch scenario.  We open on the scene of a drug deal going down, complete with a dodge through the airport that looks like it might be a success, until something goes wrong in classic Shakespearean fashion.  And so a music box doll with heroine for stuffing ends up in the hands of Alfred Pennyworth's unsuspecting photographer, who then makes the mistake of bringing it home to his wife.  If Efrem Zimbalist Jr. really was playing his most famous role, this whole situation would be solved in seconds flat (Hell, Alfred would probably realize something suspicious was going on right away, and take the doll straight to the customs desk; he would also probably be able to evade or else defend himself from any mob hitmen that might decide to make him any offers he can't refuse).

Since this isn't a Caped Crusader flick, however (despite one hilarious, hindsight Easter Egg), it means neither Bruce nor Alfred are anywhere in sight.  The fact that the protagonist namedrops the Dark Knight in a way that passes the whole thing off as an obvious joke means Gotham and its erstwhile denizens are all about as unreal as they are in reality so far as the film's secondary world is concerned.  Like I say, this isn't a DC Comics film.  Instead, it's more the sort of Thriller that Hitch would have made in his later years.  What that means in practice is that once Arkin's villain finds out where the doll is located, he still can't pinpoint where its been stashed.  Now, he could just break in when no one's home and turn the place upside down until he finds the heroine.  However, the film makes sure to telegraph that Arkin's character is something of a high-price operator.  He's the kind of guy who likes to run as clean a scheme as possible, even if things have to get messy every now and then.  That means he prides himself on a number of skills, such as never leaving any trace that he was at the scene of the crime.  Its a rule he extends all the way to the question of finger prints, and even at least "trying" to make sure there's little to no blood spilt as possible.  So rather than leave a mess that could implicate him later on, Roat decides to hire a pair of swindler thieves to see if they can connive the owners (specifically the Lady) of the house into more or less handing it over while being none the wiser.

This is the basic premise that the film starts out with.  Now what should be obvious to any veteran film fanatic is all the ways in which this scenario jibes well with the kind of stories Hitch liked to tell.  In fact, it's the sort of Creative Idea that could go either way; either as a film in its own right (which is what we got) or else it could also function just as well as a snug little episode of Hitch's very own TV anthology series.  While the film's budget is higher than the one Psycho was made for, there's still this sense of the same level of production quality as the Bates film.  Which creates this nice sense of aesthetic relation between the two otherwise unrelated projects.  Nor is that all.  Even the way the story plays out carries a lot of the familiar vibes, and maybe even some of the plot beats we still tend to associate with the maker of films like Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, or Notorious.  What Knott's scenario has in common with those pictures is the shared conceit of a story revolving around the scheme of a group of criminals trying to pull off a crime, all while trying to evade the threat of getting caught.  It's roughly the same sort of idea as that found in Dial M for Murder.  The major difference here, as critic George Dahl notes, is that the narrative focus is placed squarely on Audrey Hepburn's character, with the criminals around her assuming a more traditional, antagonist stance.  It might be their crime that Suzy's caught up in, yet it's still very much her story.  There's one other aspect to Knott's story and Carrington's adaptation that helps to make this a film worth talking about and rediscovering today.

It's that the movie is able to achieve this masterful genre set switch at a crucial moment during the story's third act.  It's a crucial part in its overall success.  However what comes before that moment is just as important.  That's because the first and second halves of the movie function as something elegiac in retrospect.  If the front and middle sections of this film function more or less like a regular Hitchcock scenario, then the final third is the moment in which the artists behind the camera and the typewriter all find the right ways to take those same techniques and plot beats a step forward.  What makes it all so subtle, clever, and even a bit nostalgic comes from the plot points Knott and Carrington introduce into the proceedings, and how this effectively allows them to mold and enhance the typical formulas and ideas that they learned from the director of Psycho.  The first and second act of the film consists of Arkin, Richard Crenna, and Jack Weston engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with Hepburn, as they try to weave a web of fiction around her.  They're trying to make her believe that she and her husband have somehow been caught up in a murder investigation, and that one of the crucial clues of evidence that will either exonerate or incriminate Alfred is that little music box doll with the stash of heroine inside. 

I can't tell whether this aspect of the film sounds ridiculous or not on paper.  However, it should be noted that not just the actors, but also the writing is of such a quality that the story is able to sell itself on just this premise alone.  It is surprisingly possible to have a great deal of fun watching these three guys try and concoct a scheme which will get Hepburn to try and unlock the safe where they believe the doll and the drug are hidden inside.  This is yet another way in which the plot borrows from the films of Hitchcock.  What we've got here is a story revolving around one of Hitch's most famous "devices", namely a McGuffin.  It is nothing more than a simple element of the plot, often an inanimate object (such as an evil magic ring, a top secret formula, an alias that doesn't exist, or a hidden cache of drugs) which serves no other function except to be the object of desire which both sets the plot in motion, and thus helps drive the story along.  That's the purpose the doll and its contents serve here in this film.  Its the reason Col. Trautman from the Rambo franchise poses as an old army friend of her husband, and why we get a chance to see Arkin have fun playing a number of imaginary personas within the fiction.  The results of this aspect of the narrative are very much as George Dahl describes it.  He claims that:

"I would say the most engaging aspect of the production, and an element that stands out, especially on stage, are the sort of "Play within a Play" scenarios that make up the framework of the story.  This an effective narrative device that Quentin Tarantino has used to great effect in much of his work.  As characters often play roles in an orchestrated scheme, in order to usually get information from other characters.  And it works really well on multiple levels.  Watching Hepburn slowly realize that something is amiss.  Watching the glances between the conmen as they communicate only with their eyes, and improvise on the fly.  Its all very enjoyable.  It's expert blocking.  There's a lot for the actors to do to keep things interesting in what would otherwise be scene after scene of exposition (ibid)".  It's also possible to go a bit further with Dahl's train of thought.  One of the interesting things I've just realized about the picture is how it forms something of an inverted companion piece to yet another Hitchcock classic.  What we've got here could be construed as the flipside of a film like Rear Window.  The entire premise of the earlier Jimmy Stewart vehicle is how the desire to spy on others is an inherent vice that can sometimes reveal more than what the peeing tom might have expected on first sight.  Its been described as a film about the problematic nature of voyeurism, which sounds more than fair.

What I think tends to get lost in the shuffle of such a discussion is that while both critics and fans tend to focus on the psychological aspect of the picture, we're only just now starting to talk about the social implications of such behavior.  In an era in which the infringement of privacy has become a hot button issue, Rear Window is a film that seems to take an explicit (perhaps even an illicit) delight in presenting its audience with one of the great moral conundrums of Western Art.  Everyone today agrees that the kind of behavior that Stewart's character gets up to in RW is something that shouldn't be just frowned upon, but perhaps also brought up in terms of overall legality.  And yet if he hadn't been such a perv, then a murderer would have gone free and escaped justice.  It's the kind of leftfield broadsides that Hitch liked to lob at his fans and general audiences from time to time.  He seems to have been forever interested in where the exact moral line in the sand lay so far as his paying customers were concerned.  Its one of the aspects of his artistry which has kept his memory and work alive long after his passing.  

What makes a film like Wait Until Dark a fascinating film to watch in relation to the Stewart flick is that is does seem (whether intentional or otherwise) that Knott has come as close as anyone ever will to providing a picture like Rear Window with as close to a complete response as possible.  Here, the theme of spying on others for illicit ends returns once again, as a vital aspect of the overall plot.  The key difference is this time there's little to no redeeming qualities in all the Toms doing the Peeping.  Even the very act itself is just a means to a much more dangerous end.  This isn't some neighborhood perv trying to place himself above his neighbors.  These are a collection of clearly dangerous men who are used to resorting to deadly violence in order to get their way.  Just to help cement the contrasted sense of thematic overlap.  The entire scheme of the villains, which requires a constant, voyeuristic surveillance on the inhabitants of a single apartment all centers around the exploits of a single woman who has lost the functioning use of her eyes.  The very sense that Stewart relied on to survive in his scenario.  Its as if Frederick Knott has taken the contents of Rear Window, and turned them inside out.  

This would have made for an amusing setup if the protagonist had been of the same make and caliber of character that Stewart's neighborhood perv displays.  That would be a situation with a greater sense of overall moral clarity to the narrative action.  To be fair, that clearer sense of where the taboo line rests scan still be said to exist in the finished product as we now have it.  It's just the fact that we aren't dealing with some deviant next door who needs to learn a lesson, but instead a kind, caring and normal woman who has been thrust into a new lifestyle against her will, that takes what sounds like the kind of amusing setup you might find in an Ocean's Eleven film, and then have it all leave a quick souring taste in your mouth as the reality of the stakes involved begins to hit home for the viewer.  It's also the way the script handles this pivotal plot point that signals Wait Until Dark as a crucial piece of transitional cinematic Horror.  There's a fine note of unease running throughout this picture.  It starts right away, clear as a bell, as the opening shot focuses on the sight of a knife slicing open the music box doll.  It's just the simplest way of packing in all that hard candy into the most inconspicuous container that the couriers can find, or have on hand.  At the same time, there's also something visceral about that opening shot, while also refraining from being all-out graphic.  Terence Young and his cinematographer, Charles Lang, play this opening like an expert bit of violin music.  It creates the perfect note of Gothic unease.

Something that gets the film off on the right footing at the very starting gate.  It create the subconscious suggestion in the audience that we're going into the kind of film that's going to take its sense of threat very damn seriously.  Movie-goers of the time might have gotten the impression that maybe they were going to be given a picture with the kind of approach that might be somewhere in the same wheelhouse as Psycho.  If any thought of this sort ever flashed through the mind of someone in the aisles of 1967, then give that person a cigar and a blowtorch to light it with.  Because that's a surmise this picture fulfills, and then some.  I've described the first and second acts in terms that make it sound like something of a romp.  That's because there are such elements at play during a lot of the moments of the picture, and some of it might be thanks to the acting of Audrey herself.  To claim that she was good at getting audiences on her side is to grant her too little credit.  Part of what makes her live on in the memory, even of viewers today is because the likeability she was able to project up on the screen was also a very true reality in real life.  There was this vulnerability about Hepburn that she brought into just about every picture she ever made, and nowhere does it seem to be on better display than in this film.

A good example of this is in the chemistry she shares with a little girl in WUD by the name of Gloria.  As portrayed by child actor Julie Herrod, Gloria is the kind of girl who I suppose could have sent to whole picture way down south in the hands of lesser writers.  The good news is that Knott and Carrington found all the right ways to make her a legit character in her own right.  In fact, there comes a moment in the film where we see Gloria lose her temper and throw a tantrum.  Where a second-rate artist would overplay the moment to the breaking point, Herrod and Carrington instead craft this picture of a young child who is angry at the way the world around her seems to be falling apart, and she doesn't quite what to do or how to handle it.  So she lashes out in those moments where she thinks she can get away with it.  What fascinating to watch about her major scene is the fallout it creates between Herrod and Hepburn.  The best way to describe it all is to tell of the idea generated by my initial reaction to that one moment.  It went something like, "This is what Shirley Jackson was sort of like as a child".  

She was just this angry, frightened kid who probably needed someone like Audrey in her life just be to be there whenever her mind went to all the dark and troubled places.  I don't know if its possible that Jackson ever go that lucky in real life.  Though the fact that Knott's play and Herrod's performance set this train of thought going is yet another sign of the transitional tone of this picture.  Much like with Jackson and her work, there's a very Gothic strain or sensibility to the character of Gloria that is able to function as yet another signal for the kind of territory or pathways that this feature film will be headed down.  Even before this troubled little kid makes her entrance, its the character of Roat and his actions (both on and off-screen) that signals where all the rail service in this film terminates.  He's the one character who determines the final stop at the end of the line, and by the time the film gets there, the audience can tell that something of a genuine generic shift has taken place in the film's sensibilities.  For me, its perhaps fitting that Gloria should be the focus of the moment when this happens.  It comes as we see Julie Herrod doing no more than making her way down the stairs of an old New York brownstone once the Sun has gone down for the day.  The action of this scene is simple.  It's the way  Young and Lang frame that moment which the film uses to signal that something like a barely perceptible sea-change has taken place.  Up till then, everything looked, acted, and sounded like something out of a Hitchcock film.  The moment we see Gloria coming down those stairs is when everything changes.

It takes place in almost complete darkness, with just the faintest glow of the kind of weird, creepy lighting that would one day go on to become a staple of 80s Horror films.  In fact, let that be as good a description for the sense of change this otherwise quiet and unassuming shot in the film portends.  From that moment on, it looks, sounds, and even feels as if Hitchcock had deliberately decided to step out of the director's chair, and hand the reigns over to someone like John Carpenter.  Indeed, the final third act feels like an overlooked project that the future director of Halloween might have done during his journeyman years.  Something to help establish his credentials while on the road to Haddonfield, Illinois.  Even before we've reached this point, however, the story has sent up several warning flairs of where the proceedings are headed.  The first major clue outside of the opening knife shot is when Alan Arkin makes his first big entrance.  Its a moment of pitch-perfect, and understated menace.  The moment he walks through the door of Hepburn's apartment for the first time is the second major clue this film has that it will be taking all the best scenarios we've known from the past, and carrying them forward in brave new territory.  What happens after Arkin's entrance is yet another example of the story playing its cast like well-tuned instruments.  At first, we're in pretty familiar Hitchcockian territory.

Three of the four main cast members are busy assembling and introducing themselves to one another on stage.  Its handled with a heady mixture of the familiar and the new.  The situation itself wouldn't be at all out of place in a film like Strangers on a Train.  What adds a new sense of danger to this otherwise well-worn scenario is the distinct modern edge that Knott's script and Arkin's performance are able to bring to the table.  It's not that difficult to describe Arkin's acting in these scenes.  I'm just concerned whether or not I'm able to do him justice here.  He presents a heady mixture of contrasts.  His voice alone would make you think you're talking to the leader of the college chess club.  This high strung, nasally nerd who's too soft-spoken for his own good.  What throws you off is how that voice is combined with a dark leather coat, along with matching sunglasses and hat.  If that description doesn't give the proper sense of what I'm talking about, then the final ingredient has to be the way Arkin carries both himself and his character.  Imagine a version of Heisenberg who just can't be bothered to give a damn.  That might sound like I'm overselling things, yet I'll swear that's not the case.  You've just got to see this performance for yourself in order to understand.  The third and final flair signal this film gives as to its ultimate overall direction comes from the first confrontation between Arkin, Crenna, and Weston.  It comes not long after Roat has introduced himself to his new, reluctant accomplices.

At first, everything is about as civilized as you can get between three crooks who are deciding whether or not to go into business, for however brief a while.  Then things disintegrate to the point where Arkin's villain decides to draw forth a stiletto with its handle carved in the shape of a naked woman.  The reaction he gets from both of his less than eager "partners" is for Weston to grab hold of a nearby camera stand (the kind with sharp spikes embedded in the legs for shooting in rough terrain) and using it like a kind of half-assed spear.  Col. Trautman, meanwhile, picks up an actual camera, one of those old fashion sorts where the strap attached had to be extra strong, because the photo maker was one of those older models that you could use for an impromptu weight-lifting session if you wanted, and then starts swinging it like a medieval mace, aimed straight a Roat's head.  Once he' been subdued, Arkin grants his accomplices the key to a closet where he's stashed something away.  There's a nasty surprise waiting for Trautman and his friend in that closet.  I won't go into details, and instead choose to limit myself to this little hint for modern day viewers.  When the door to that closet opens, don't be surprised if the final result is to hear Angelo Badalamenti's familiar Twin Peaks theme playing in your head.

All of which is to say that, yeah, it's that kind of a film.  It goes there.  Here's where I'm going to have to turn the review over to none other than Stephen King for just a minute.  Because my own experience of Wait Until Dark was enough (or so it was for me) to allow me the ability to say that the acclaimed author's words in the following passages are all one-hundred percent true.  The author of The Shining starts by laying a further bit of the aesthetic context in which Knott and Young's story operates.  Part of it is based upon an interesting sort of paradox.  "(We)  might be able to say, paradox or not, that movies of fairy-tale horror demand a heavy dose of reality to get them rolling. Such reality frees the imagination of excess baggage and makes the weight of unbelief easier to lift. The audience is propelled into the movie by the feeling that, under the right set of circumstances, this could happen (193)".  The second aspect of this fairy tale like quality that frames the nature of Knott's narrative is that its greatest effect comes from its ability to play upon one of our most universal discomforts.  For King, it's all a simple question of Fear of the Dark.  "I tell people who say that horror movies don’t scare them to make this simple experiment. Go see a film like Night of the Living Dead all alone (have you ever noticed how many people go to horror movies, not just in pairs or groups, but in actual packs?). 

"Afterwards, get in your car, drive to an old, deserted, crumbling house—every town has at least one...Let yourself in. Mount to the attic. Sit down up there. Listen to the house groan and creak around you. Notice how much those creaks sound like someone—or something— mounting the stairs. Smell the must. The rot. The decay. Think about the film you have just seen. Consider it as you sit there in the dark, unable to see what might be creeping up... what might be just about to place its dirty, twisted claw on your shoulder... or around your neck... This sort of thing can prove, by its very darkness, to be an enlightening experience. Fear of the dark is the most childlike fear. Tales of terror are customarily told “around the campfire” or at least after sundown, because what is laughable in the sunshine is often tougher to smile at by starlight. This is a fact that every maker of horror films and writer of horror tales recognizes and uses— it is one of those unfailing pressure points where the grip of horror fiction is surest. This is particularly true of the film¬ makers, of course, and of all the tools that the filmmaker can bring to bear, it is perhaps this fear of the dark that seems the most natural, since, movies must, by their very nature, be viewed in the dark.  

"It was Michael Cantalupo, an assistant editor at Everest House, who reminded me of a gimmick used in the first-run engagements of Wait Until Dark, and in this context it bears an affectionate mention. The last fifteen or twenty minutes of that film are utterly terrifying, partially due to virtuoso performances turned in by Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin (and in my view, Arkin’s performance as Harry Roat, Jr., from Scarsdale may be the greatest evocation of screen villainy ever, rivalling and perhaps surpassing Peter Lorre’s in M), partially due to the brilliant gimmick on which Frederick Knott’s story turns. Hepburn, in a final desperate effort to save her life, breaks every damned lightbulb in the apartment and hallway, so that she and the sighted Arkin will be on even terms. Trouble is, she forgets one light... but you and I probably would have forgotten it, too. It’s the bulb inside the refrigerator.

"Anyway, the in-theater gimmick was to turn out every damn light in the auditorium except for the EXIT lights over the doors. I never realized until the last ten minutes of Wait Until Dark how much light there is in most theaters, even when the movie’s playing. There are those tiny “dim-bulbs” set into the ceiling if the theater is one of the new breed, those gauche but somehow lovely electric flambeaux glowing along the walls in the older ones. In a pinch, you can always find your ,way back to your seat after using the bathroom by the light being thrown from the screen itself. Except that the climactic few minutes of Wait Until Dark are set entirely in that black apartment. You have only your ears, and what they hear—Miss Hepburn screaming, Arkin’s tortured breathing (he’s been stabbed a bit earlier on, and we’re allowed to relax a little, to think he might even be dead, when he pops out again like a malefic jack-in-the-box)— isn’t very comforting. So there you sit. Your big old Boeing- 747 brain is cranked up like a kid’s jalopy with the pedal to the metal, and it has very little concrete input to work on. So you sit there, sweating it out, hoping the lights will eventually come on again... sooner or later, they do. Mike Cantalupo told me he saw Wait Until Dark in a theater so sleazy that even the exit lights were broken.

"Man, that must have been bad (194-96)".  King describes the way Young's film doles out it scares rests in the way it handles the same power of blackness that other Gothic writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne knew about so well.  Also like with the chilling corridors of The House of Seven Gables, the words that Fred Knott uses to set up his final act are able to lend the encroaching shadows more or less that same quality of the fairy tale.  It's one of those conceits which begins to explain itself well enough, once you give it a bit of thought.  What else is a figure like Harry Roat Jr., after all, except a version of the Big Bad Wolf from the tales of the Brothers Grimm, with all of the character's previous monstrous qualities still left intact.  The only difference is that this time the the true nature of the Werewolf lies hidden beneath the thinnest human mask.  It makes sense to claim that there is something inhuman about Arkin's character.  Near the end, Suzy postulates that "it's different with him".  He's the kind of guy who gave into some kind of fundamental addiction a long time ago, and the final result is the shadowy figure that stands ready to greet us as the curtain opens.  It makes a certain amount of sense to claim that Roat is a modern day Werewolf archetype.  Like the creature of folklore, Arkin's villain possesses an uncanny ability to shapeshift at a moments notice.  This is something the man from Scarsdale is able to demonstrate early on, when he passes himself off first as a father, then as a son in just a few seconds.

What grants this talent for playing many parts as the situation demands an air of the folkloric uncanny is that it almost works too well.  When we see Roat pull off his gifts for disguise, it comes along during the lighter seeming second half of the film.  This is where the playwright can be seen having a lot of fun with the lessons he's learned from Hitchcock.  It's almost possible, as you're watching this pack of con artists creating imaginary scenarios around Hepburn's main character, to wonder if maybe they missed their true calling as actors of one stripe of another.  They just seem to be that good at it.  You almost wish their con was the actual truth.  It sounds like one hell of a story worth diving into.  Then we enter the final act, and the veneer of humanity has disappeared entirely.  The viewer begins to realize that all the tomfoolery that we witnessed earlier was just a form of the monster hiding his fangs and claws behind the appearance of unassuming humanity.  When darkness rolls around, however, you begin to realize that we're watching some version of a familiar story in which it is Dr. Jekyll who has been a mere surface masque the whole time.  There's only ever been Mr. Hyde, and now the Sun's gone out, and the Moon is full.  The last few minutes therefore wind up very much as King describes it to us.

After all that buildup, it's revealed that we've been watching a very clever riff on the Big Bad Wolf story, with Hepburn's Suzy as this movie's version of Little Red Riding Hood.  It's an interesting place for the narrative to end up at.  In doing so, Frederick Knott seems to have been able to make two accomplishments at once.  On the one hand,  he's been able to produce that all-important "singular and not unpleasing" effect that writers like Hawthorne highlighted as the highest goal for a Horror story.  Namely that of "imagining a train of incidents in which the spirit and mechanism of the faëry legend should be combined with the characters and manners of familiar life (web)".  It's one particular side effect of this approach where the movie's second and perhaps most crucial achievement lies.  I began this review by pointing out how Alfred Hitchcock more or less invented the Slasher genre with a film like Psycho.  In that sense, it's a mistake to claim that a film like this breaks anything like "new ground".  At the same time, it has still managed a very specific feat which makes its relative neglect something of a crime in retrospect.  What Frederick Knott and Terence Young have given their audience here is nothing less than the next big step in the development of the Slasher film, and its most distinctive character.  In that sense, Roat is best seen as the missing relative in the Slasher family tree.

While later additions like Leatherface and Michael Myers have gone on to steal the spotlight away from this character, perhaps a mistake has been made in our collective rush to appreciate the shock values these later Horror villains brought to the table.  Doing so creates a gap in our memory that leaves us unable to gain of proper understanding of what films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween were building off of.  I'd argue that when you go and look at a film like Wait Until Dark, what you've uncovered is nothing less than a crucial strand of missing DNA in the Horror genre's history.  Harry Roat Jr. is that missing link brought to life by the words of Knott and Carrington, and helped along also by Alan Arkin's performance.  What these three artists have managed to forge together is best described as something of a compound ghost.  He contains a great deal of the best strands of characterization from countless villains from the Gothic genre's past.  This includes those found in, yet not confined by, the work of Hitchcock.  If there's a bit of Norman Bates in him, then it's also possible to find elements of Joseph Cotton's Merry Widow Murderer from 1943's Shadow of a Doubt.  The great innovation lies in the specific narrative direction that Knott and Carrington take this figure in.  

It's not the first time audiences have seen a villainous character stalk the silver screen.  It is, however, the first time such a figure has spoken and acted in a way that might be thought of as the first appearance of what we'd now call, or think of, as the Modern Slasher style of behavior.  What sets him apart from the likes of Cotton or Perkins antagonists is that there's no question that we might be dealing with some Jekyll and Hyde personality.  This is no tortured soul struggling with his darker impulses.  Knott's villain isn't the kind of guy you can fit in as one of the regular, guilt-ridden main leads in a Martin Scorsese movie.  Instead, the biggest innovation that the playwright and screenwriter are able to bring to the table is twofold.  (1) They've made the wise choice to allow their villain to be a flat-out monster, and (2) they've somehow managed to find all the right traits of speech and mannerism that allows this character display and debut in embryonic form the type of Gothic sensibilities that would one day go on to define the attributes of the villains at the heart of Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter's own efforts within the sub-genre.  Harry Roat is little more than the long-lost grandaddy of the modern Slasher film.  And the way the writer's were able to bring him about was to realize he was a monster.

For what is the imaginary Slasher of Gothic fiction, after all, but just another masque plastered onto whatever goes Bump in the Night that frightens us the most?  Call him the Werewolf, because that's a fitting description of him.  Call him also the Ghost, or just a plain Monster, for those are all fitting titles.  Basically, all that Knott and Carrington had to do was to remember that the psycho killer is a figment of the Imagination that has its roots in the macabre, and then to let this most fundamental of facts dictate how the character walks, talks, and above all, chills and thrills.  In doing so, Terence Young and his collaborators have managed to pull off a genuine artistic accomplishment.  Yet there's something bittersweet about it as well.  They've taken the taboo line that Hitch crossed almost a whole decade ago with the Shower Scene, and then managed to redraw the line even further up and further in.  They've made a genuine cinematic and storytelling breakthrough.  Yet in doing so, they've also sort of created the moment when it is time for the torched to be passed, from one generation of filmmakers onto the next.  This grants the film a quality that's best described as a salutary irony.  On the one hand, Terence Young, Robert Carrington, Frederick Knott, and by extension, Alfred Hitchcock have all pooled their talents together, and by creating first Psycho and then later on Wait Until Dark, have more or less found all the right ways of taking the Horror genre forward into what would become its modern age in the 80s.

I ought to be clear upfront, in no unequivocal terms, that taken together, each film marks a genuine form of artistic achievement.  These are pictures that have earned the title of Masterpiece.  In one case, what we have on our hands is nothing less than a criminally neglected cinematic tour de force.  There is no other word that can accurately describe Wait Until Dark except as a great film.  With this in mind, my real critical remarks aren't concerned with Knott and Young's efforts.  Instead, the real focus of my train of thought now has to do with a lot of the ways in which the legacy of their bequeathed techniques were handled in a post-Michael Myers landscape.  The fate of the Horror genre during the 1980s has long been a contentious topic for me.  On the one hand, yes, a lot taboo boundaries that needed breaking down were finally more or less eliminated from problems of artistic consideration.  This is what allowed the genre the room necessary to stretch its legs.  At the same time, one of the frustrating things about how the Horror story was handled in that decade is the way that practitioners in the field came away with the mistaken notion that just tossing buckets of red color dyed water, and human intestines made of rubber and plastic, would somehow be enough to compensate for a lack of creative vision.  A good way to demonstrate what I'm talking about is to compare a figure like Harry Roat with someone who is perhaps his most iconic cinematic descendant.  Even if no one has ever seen a single installment of the Friday the 13th franchise, just about everyone out there knows something about Jason Voorhees.

The punchline is that here we have a character were the final results amount to very little worth knowing, or even caring about.  He is the textbook example of a worthless idea being turned into a pop culture idol.  If you stop and think about it, all of the Jason films fall into a certain formula, and the irony of what I'm going to call this anti-narrative pattern is that it sort of involves taking the sophistication of all the tropes laid out by Hitchcock, Young, and Knott, and turning them in the worst form of parody.  One where all the intelligence and drama is drained out of the situation, until all we're left with is a series of tropes which have now become less archetypes, and more akin to latter day punchlines.  It got to the point where the current incarnation of these tropes was made fun of in the Cabin in the Woods movie, where everything had degenerated into tropes such as the Jock, The Loose Girl, the Stoner/Slacker, and, of course, the Final Girl.  I'll bet you anything its possible to trace a line of literal descent from a film like Wait Until Dark all the way to Cabin in the Woods.  To do so would be to immerse yourself into a pretty disappointing historical trajectory.  One in which we get a chance to watch all the Imagination get sucked out of a genre that is more or less meant to thrive on flights of fantasy by its very nature.  It's like watching the IQ of a once cultured and sophisticated mind start to go into a slow, unaccountable decline; to watch an Einstein somehow degenerate into the classroom dunce.

This is something I could probably rant on about forever if I let myself.  It could even be worthy of an article in its own right.  For now, I'll just leave this topic off by saying that there is still a lot to like about 80s Horror films, yet aside from a handful of examples, pretty much none of the most iconic cinematic boogeymen from that time period can offer a good reason for why that's the case.  On the whole, I tend to think that the best filmmakers in the field during the Reagan years can be boiled down to just three.  George Romero was able to realize that even the use of gore in a Horror film can be intelligent.  While it seems as if John Carpenter has gone on to be the one filmmaker who best defines what many considered to be like the classic incarnation of 80s style Horror.  Sam Raimi, meanwhile, has done cinema scholars studying that decade a real favor by creating at least two noteworthy films that, taken together, serve as a very good satire of the whole Splatterpunk craze that came to dominate the genre.  I guess the general idea that I'm trying to work my way toward here is that in terms of the legacy that a film like Wait Until Dark might have will be best exemplified by any genre effort that's able to prove it's taken the lessons set down by Knott and Young to heart.  With this in mind, there's a perhaps fitting irony in knowing that it is not even films, but rather former TV Movies of the Week, such as Steven Spielberg and Richard Matheson's Duel, and John Carpenter's Someone's Watching Me are able to give a better demonstration of later filmmakers in the genre being able to carry the true nature, and hence the legacy of this otherwise unassuming little Slasher flick on into modern times.

As for the film on its own, Wait Until Dark is best described one of those stories that a blog like this is more or less made for.  It's always been one of the underlying purposes of The Scriblerus Club to try and unearth forgotten relics of the past, and see if they can stand up to not just having their day in the spotlight, but also if they can have their reputations revived for contemporary audiences in some fashion or other.  With that in mind, Wait Until Dark is a film that checks all of these boxes in spades.  Another way to say it is that I can now understand why a writer like Stephen King would be impressed by a film like this, to the point that he would use it as an extended example of how a Horror story can be done just right.  Because that's very much what this film is.  An almost textbook demonstration of the type of  the type of Fairy Tale Horror that the author claims the genre will always reach for and attain whenever it reaches a genuine level of artistic worth.  An added bonus that comes along with it lies in the discovery of all the historical value that this one single reference in an obscure non-fiction textbook can turn out to have.  It's a crucial missing piece of the puzzle that is the development of Horror fiction into all the modern formats that we now take for granted today.  And the added value of a film like Wait Until Dark is that it grants viewers a walking, talking snapshot of the genre at a crucial transition of moment.

It goes without saying this is the kind of film that's more than easy to recommend.  When a gem like this is in danger of falling through the cracks, the critic is almost placed under a special sense of obligation.  There's an inherent sense of responsibility toward not just the film, but also the memory of all the talented artists involved to make sure that their collective efforts are never forgotten.  The good news for the legacies of Young, Hepburn, Arkin, and Knott is that their efforts seem to experiencing the faintest hints of a possible rediscovery in the 21st century.  Contemporary audiences and critics have been going online to sing the film's praises, often citing the acting chops of Hepburn and Arkin as a main reason for it being worth checking out.  That's true enough, and the two actors just listed are a pair of Hollywood legends who don't deserve to be forgotten.  However, I think I've made a pretty good case here for all of the thematic riches to be found in the writing of this story which makes it such a worthy blast from the past that deserves to be dusted off and re-released so that others today can see just how good it is.  That's the level of thematic quality involved here.  The fact that Young and Knott were able to make all this sophistication look effortless is one of the best testaments to their strengths as storytellers.  I also think part of what has helped this film regain its feet is a change in the genre itself.

It does seem as if the debut of pictures like The Blair Witch Project have had one beneficial effect for the artistic expression of Horror going forward.  There really does seem to have been a quiet yet noticeable reaction away from the kind of Freddy and Jason school of telling tales in this genre that didn't just predominate, but also came close to labeling the format as a ridiculous joke.  Since then, the good news is that artists and audiences seem to have been making a slow rediscovery that there can be a level of genuine artistic sophistication to a work set in this genre, and older films like Wait Until Dark seem to have been a lucky and welcome beneficiary of this shift in audience tastes.  I sure hope that's the truth, anyway.  One thing is for sure, even if that's how things are, Frederick Knott's neat little Thriller is a film that deserves to have more of the spotlight trained on it.  Doing so can grant modern audiences a better understanding of the various subtleties and alternative narrative techniques that we've let fall by the wayside in our growing obsession with the current blockbuster format.  It's also a great gateway film for developing an enthusiasm for the Golden, Silver and New Wave Ages of Classic Hollywood cinema.  Knott's story is somewhat unique in that its ultimate creation amounts to a hybrid amalgamation.  It's a narrative which contains elements from all of cinema's major time periods.

This makes it something of a living time capsule in and of itself.  More than all this, however, there is the value of the story itself as an Entertainment.  In this, the movie is able to succeed in spades.  What we've got here is the classic kind of slow-burn Horror film of the type that Hitchcock would have been proud to make.  In fact, with all the familiar names and talent involved, it's something of a wonder that Hitch himself isn't in the director's chair for this one.  It would have gone down as perhaps his last great effort, and a fitting capper to a long and thriving career of not just revolutionizing the techniques of filmmaking, but also of showing the audience how the Gothic genre can be made into a fun and engaging form of Art that is still able to hold its own to this day.  All of those criterion for the Master of Suspense's films are applicable to the efforts of Terence Young and Fred Knott.  In a way, it almost makes sense to call it an honorary Hitchcock film.  For all of these reasons above, I can very much say that a film like Wait Until Dark is not worth just buying, but also worth a Blu-ray and 4K upgrade and re-release.  It has that level of quality to it, and is a worthy film that deserved to be remembered.