A few nights ago we watched "Wait Until Dark" a sixties film with Audrey Hepburn. She plays a recently blinded woman, married to Ephram Zimbalist Jr, a photographyer. He is the unwitting recipient of a doll filled with heroin and the woman who asked him to hold it for her is murdered and her killers are after the doll. Richard Crenna, looking very young, is one of the two excops drawn into the scheme and Alan Arkin plays the psychopath who hires them. They send the husband away on a wild goose chase in order to terrorize the wife, Hepburn, into giving them the doll, but it has disappeared and they don't believe her. This was a play, but the claustrophobia is perfect in the basement flat, and most of the plot twists are clever and plausible. Hepburn is excellent. What I couldn't quite get over is her thinness; she is wearing clothes that have her looking skeleton like. In other films this is better hidden. I couldn't help but think of her and her mother as refugees in World War II, starving and desperate. Sometimes Angelina Jolie looks emaciated as well, and to me at least, it is disturbing and hurts the story.
I think this film wears well, and the suspense is gripping and the only real flaw is Zimbalist's character, who is too paternal with his wife, and my last thought of the movie is she should definitely divorce him and find a more sensitive man.
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