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ElizabethJoestar's Replies
That's part of the fun of watching a lot of these older movies! I have similar feelings when I come across young Richard Attenborough in movies from the 1940s and 1950s since I'm so used to seeing him as an older guy in JURASSIC PARK.
While fun, I do think the movie is a bit messy in execution. The satire seems to go all over the place and the humor might have been a little too goofy for some. However, the movie is far from bad in my opinon and I enjoy watching it from time to time-- the script just needed another rewrite to get the pacing down better IMO.
This. No contest. It's so disjointed and sleazy. I just pitied everyone involved.
As for my confession/sacrilege, I don't like TWO FOR THE ROAD. Other people find it beautiful and artsy, but the characters are so grating for me.
PSYCHO is definitely grimier and more of an outright horror movie as well as a bolder cinematic experiment in general. Heck, the monochrome alone makes it creepy (that’s part of why it’s hard for me to get into PSYCHO 2—the Bates Motel feels wrong in color!).
I don’t much compare WUD to PSYCHO—as far as Hitchcock’s oeuvre goes, I think WUD is more like ROPE or REAR WINDOW in terms of tone. Those films were also in color, populated by attractive performers, and kept to a one-room setting, slowly mounting the tension as the story progresses. PSYCHO is just a whole other ballgame—even watching that movie now, it feels like a revelation, a diving line between classic and modern cinema. (I still remember watching PSYCHO at a college screening with fellow 20-somethings a few years ago and when we had to walk back to our dorms in the dark, it was so very very unnerving!).
That being said, while Terence Young mostly sticks to conventional direction, the lighting in the climactic scene is phenomenal. I don’t consider WUD horror, but those scenes with the apartment only lit by a safety light, then the flickering matches and then the cold, electric light of the icebox—those were all masterful. They make that set, so warmly lit and “studio” earlier, seem nightmarish and unfamiliar, especially when you see the enraged Roat dragging his bleeding body through puddles of gasoline to get to poor Susy.
One gets the weird feeling that Roat -- somehow -- may do a little "off-Broadway acting" somehow squeezed in between murders and drug trade work. I'm SERIOUS. Why ELSE would he be so invested in playing characters and "dressing up" even when his audience is blind?
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No I get you! A friend and I joke that Roat is a failed theater student who couldn’t make it onstage, so now he uses his skills with performance and make-up to pay the bills! When I think of all the wigs, costumes, and pancake makeup he has to have in the back of his van, I cannot help but smile. The guy definitely lives his passions.
About the only other explanation for him dressing up despite targeting a blind woman is that it’s all for the sake of Gloria, who is also in the building that day. She caught a good look at both Jr and Sr so it was a good thing he put his off-Broadway skills to use!
One detail I really love is when Jr first appears—Mike answers the door, then gives Roat Jr is “are you serious” look that always has me laughing. And Roat just keeps rolling with it. Honestly, with a few tweaks, you could turn this story into a comedy… just like Romeo and Juliet is a rom-com gone wrong, WAIT could be seen as a potential farce turned bloody and horrifying.
Ah...what a difference some years and an X rating would offer -- though Kubrick wasn't interested much in a "straight ahead thriller," either with Clockwork Orange, or, some years later, with The Shining. He was an "art guy" -- with a very disturbing vision.
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Oh definitely-- I'm a big Kubrick nerd and ACO is actually a favorite of mine, though I understand your issues with it listed in a later post. (Personally, I see it as more "Alex is transformed into a figure of state-sanctified evil with questionable claims to being 'cured', thereby becoming more loathsome and dangerous" rather than Alex's evil is excused or even that he just returns to being a street thug... but that's for the ACO board.) However, I felt like making the comparison just to say how suggesting Roat's intentions through his words, physical behavior, and leering is more effective in a thriller like this (rather than a dystopian satire like ACO) than having Roat just throw Susy onto the bed and tear her clothes off. What you imagine can be so much worse.
“And yet, there is no blood on Lisa, its is a reminder that Wait Until Dark is largely bereft of the kind of blood and gore and "ultra-violence" of thrillers to follow. I think with Audrey Hepburn in it(for a million dollars), it was held to a certain "lower level of gore, higher level of suspense and scream-able action”
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Oh definitely, though I always thought Lisa was likely strangled and probably with that pink scarf Roat uses to torment Susy with (it makes his dragging it over her face like that much grosser if you assume it’s a murder weapon). Heck, I figured he was going to strangle Susy after assaulting her in the bedroom since he leaves Geraldine on the kitchen table but still has the scarf in his coat pocket.
However, Hepburn being in the movie does give it a “classiness” that prevented the filmmakers from going insane with blood or sleaze. For example, later “blind women in peril” movies like SEE NO EVIL and PENTHOUSE NORTH often have scenes with the protagonist stripping down and bathing while the leering villains lurk nearby, adding cynical exploitation to the suspense. Can’t imagine THAT flying in this movie.
I just got into this series early this year. I'm currently in the middle of Diamond is Unbreakable. It really is such a unique and addictive series-- I think what I love most beyond the fun characters and flamboyant style is how each part just seems to reinvent itself.
It's hilarious because he looked so calm and confident before. In fact, i think it's the first time we see him lose his cool in the movie.
I always wondered how different things would have gone down had Susy just decided, "I'm staying home!"
While that scenario would be unpleasant for the men, it would be downright awful for poor Susy.
That last bit with Sam is absolutely terrible, I agree.
From a writer's perspective, I have often wondered why the screenwriters (and tbh even Knott-- in the play, Sam doesn't call for her but he does deliberately stop and wait for her to find him) chose to have Sam not run up to Susy. The woman was almost turned into swiss cheese by a psychopath. He just got home to find the bodies of two strange men on the ground and the room stinking of gasoline. Also Susy is covered in blood and cowering behind a fridge.
Just to briefly play devil's advocate, I get in the earlier scenes why he's being harsh-- there's the sense that Susy's reluctance to help herself (such as with the fallen pepper shaker) and moments of self-pity disappoint him since he seems well-aware that she is capable of taking care of herself to a greater degree than she is willing to accept, and Sam is an ex-Marine, meaning he probably has a tough love philosophy to begin with. Having that conflict between them also makes it more believable that she is at least likely to consider he might be at least yearning for "greener pastures" during the con, especially since she's already self-conscious about her inability to see (I always think of Hepburn bitterly going "if those are letters from Mrs. Roat, don't read them to me!" when Mike finds her old love letters-- she's afraid of having her fears of Sam secretly wanting to abandon her validated).
However, that's early in the movie and had Sam not been a jerk in the final scene, I think people would at least tolerate him. By the end, Susy's already proven her self-reliance and smarts to the most important party: the audience. Circumnavigating Alan Arkin's corpse to hug Sam is not necessary to prove to us or heck even Sam that she can take care of herself. Actually, the 2013 Jeffrey Hatcher rewrite of the play has Susy insist on going over to Sam by herself-- at least that is far less harsh and allows Susy to make that call!
Don't forget both have scenes where a villain threatens to set Hepburn on fire.
These two movies having (broadly) similar plots is a great example of how similar premises can come out differently. It's all down to execution. CHARADE is romantic and bubbly, even with its touches of gallows humor. Its Paris setting is glamorous even with all the murders cropping up, whereas WAIT UNTIL DARK is far more sinister. The NYC in that movie, while not exactly the same level of urban grime as MIDNIGHT COWBOY, seems far more dangerous and grotty-- pretty far from the fairy tale melancholy of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S.
You're on the money when you say these films feel a bit more "contemporary" than the Hitchcock movies of the same decade do (not that Hitchcock ever felt particularly "hip," not even in his silent films when he was a young guy). CHARADE oozes the early 60s with its colorful opening and soundtrack (though as Bruce Eder admits in his Criterion essay, the sexual morality of the movie is more 1950s than anything). WAIT UNTIL DARK reflects more of the later, more turbulent part of the decade in small ways: the drugs, the counterculture, hints of unpleasant violence which might have been made more explicit had the movie been released just two or three years later, etc. Not that either of these films are anything close to social commentary but it is cool seeing the period reflected in them.
In fact, both of these films are great transitional movies. CHARADE is pure Old Hollywood escapism just before the bottom fell out in the middle of the 1960s as well as one of Cary Grant's final stand-out roles. WAIT UNTIL DARK is a movie of both beginnings and endings (simultaneously Audrey Hepburn's last movie made during her superstar heyday and one of the early films of Alan Arkin, who's still in movies 50+ years on)-- I consider it neither Old Hollywood nor New Hollywood. It exists in its own weird twilight state, being released just as movies like THE GRADUATE were making waves.
Re: Tarantino, I know the critics savaged him as well, but given they seemed to be riding a backlash against him as a pop culture icon and filmmaker, I have to wonder if he really was that terrible. I imagine he wasn't that great given he's not much of an actor in other things I've seen him in, but I always wonder what his version of the disguises would have been like. That production of WAIT UNTIL DARK set the story in the then-contemporary 1990s and his normal attire looks more grunge than beatnik obviously.
I have to say, I think setting the story beyond the 1960s kind of robs it of part of its retro charm. That and it's hard to put that story into a later context without it seeming stodgy. I guess that's why when Jeffrey Hatcher re-adapted the play in 2013, he set it back in the 1940s... though once again, I miss the 60s setting, which has such particular charms, namely a sense of the seedier side of the counterculture invading an "ordinary" American home.
I did hear one story, though I don’t know if it’s true: according to a story at an Audrey Hpeburn retrospective in the early 1990s (at the Film Society of Lincoln Center), Arkin went to visit his mother after this film premiered. Normally, she would shower him with praise for his work, but that time, she was cold and rather annoyed with him. When he asked what was wrong, she said, “Alan, how could you do all that to that wonderful girl?!” Once again, I have no idea if that is true, but it is funny.
Actually, Arkin’s own distaste for his experience playing this role makes it all the more disturbing for me. On my Criterion bluray for THE IN-LAWS, there is an interview in which Arkin talks about his big roles in the 60s and 70s, and he says working with Audrey was the only pleasant thing about WUD. He said something like, “I hated feeling like I was inhabiting this guy’s body,” like playing the role grossed him out. I kind of feel sorry for him—but not really. We got a great performance from his suffering lmao. I'm actually very sad he never played more villains. The only time he ever topped his onscreen body count in this movie was when he appeared on THE MUPPET SHOW in 1980 and comically slaughtered a bunch of puppet bunnies (not joking; that happened).
Then again, NORTH from 1994 is kind of a scary movie too.....
We’ll have to disagree about Roat being predatory towards women. I always got that vibe from him in the movie as opposed to the play: between the laundry-sniffing, face stroking, and the emphasis of “I want you in the bedroom,” not to mention the fact that Lisa's blouse is torn open, I find it very likely his sadism extends to the sexual. It would be another way to exercise power over Susy and Lisa in particular, both of them women who dare to go against his interests. Compared to what a modern filmmaker would do, it’s all subtle and more open to speculation though and the ambiguity of his bedroom plans actually makes the sequence more terrifying than an outright graphic sequence a la A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Whether Roat was going to attack Susy that way or not, emphasizing the “bedroom” was a good way of at least making Susy assume that might have been a part of his intentions, thus terrifying her even more.
(Going back to the Zaroff connection, I always felt that both those characters linked violence with desire. Zaroff has a door knocker featuring a centaur carrying off a woman and Roat’s knife is in the shape of a half-dressed Venus figure. Heck, even the way he tears open the doll to get the heroin out suggests those elements to me: he pulls the skirt up first then pierces it with the phallic symbol—er, I mean Geraldine. It’s a very Hitchcock move, if I do say so, suggesting rather than spelling out violence.)
As far as other sadistic villains I find in Roat’s tier, I gotta go with Count Zaroff as played by Leslie Banks in THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME and Alex Delarge in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Zaroff is a pure sadist like Roat, and mixes an animalistic bloodlust with a keen intellect and charming manner that makes him compelling despite how awful a person he is.
As for Alex, like Roat, he sees himself as a kind of artist in evil. I always felt Roat took a bizarre pride in his con: he goes far more into detail with his costuming than Carlino or Mike do, and there’s this great moment after he expresses exaggerated shock at “Mrs. Roat”’s death over the phone where he’s outside and he makes this annoyed grunt, like he thinks his performance isn’t good enough! Just as Alex sees himself as the Beethoven of crime, linking his “ultraviolence” with his love of classical music, Roat seems to view himself as an Orson Welles of crime, directing, writing, and acting in his own perverse dramas. (Good on pointing out Bob Rusk too—he has a humorous element to him as well, but he is so messed up that he isn’t as likeable, oddly enough. Then again, I find that movie on the whole too unpleasant to really enjoy.)
I actually have seen the Keach version! I liked Keach’s turn too: he’s rather reserved and jovial at the start, but by the time it gets to the climactic scene, he goes bonkers in the most delightful way. I noticed the “femme” approach he went for too—it’s so strange. I do agree it was meant to differentiate him from Arkin and perhaps recall villains like Norman Bates, though some modern audiences might find that more “problematic” now. One thing I don’t care as much for is that he shouts and snarls a lot, whereas Arkin never raised his voice even when making threats (in fact, he only ever shouts when he loses control of the situation, such as when Susy throws the hypo in his face or douses him with diesel, or when someone else touches him without permission).
That TV film is on the whole decent, though obviously not as cinematic as the big screen version. I liked Ross well enough, though she lacks that fragility and vulnerability that makes Hepburn so sympathetic. I was far more scared for Hepburn’s Susy, perhaps because she’s already so tormented even before the criminals show up to give her the evening from hell. The film script actually plays up her marital conflict with Sam. While this does make Sam less sympathetic, it also makes it easier to believe she would be easy prey for Roat’s charade—she already thinks he resents her and that makes your heart ache for her even more.
(Also, I’m glad I’m not the only one who notices the major differences between the dialogue in the movie versus the play! Knott was in his fifties when writing WUD, so it makes sense he wasn’t as in-tune to the slang of the time. The husband-wife team that penned the screenplay hipped it up a lot and made it all seem more natural. Even small changes, such as Mike asking “What’s your favorite toy?” instead of “What do you use to protect yourself?” do a great deal in making the bad guys seem cooler and streetwise.)
You're not alone with that. I'm about the only Audrey Hepburn/Stanley Donen fan I know who's completely cold to this one.
I find a lot of people have a great love for this movie and good for them, but the two times I watched it, I found myself unable to care about the couple. In fact, I was rooting for Hepburn to up and leave Finney the entire time. He was so obnoxious. It went beyond him being a decent person with major flaws-- he was an outright ass.
A common ad hominem comeback by certain fans seems to be "you just can't relate" or "you've never been married" but even my parents-- who almost got divorced when I was a kid and who have had their share of fights over the years-- both found the depiction of marriage more Hollywood and unbelievable than anything. Of course, they're just one couple and not everyone's experience with marriage is the same, but I find the whole "this movie is perfect, you're just incompetent/not experienced enough to get it" angle the film's defenders often resort to against anyone who doesn't love it downright insulting.
Once again, more power to those who love this movie. There is certainly a lot to appreciate in terms of cinematography, acting (Hepburn does well playing an unusual role for her), and music (the Mancini score elicits more emotion from me than the story does). I just cannot get myself invested and by the end, I'm more annoyed than enervated.
I actually think this review states my disappointment with the movie best:
https://1001plus.blogspot.com/2017/09/marriage-gone-bad.html
It was kind of cathartic to read after being told "you're wrong" after failing to like the movie twice.
I think it's more than safe to say that THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR was a major inspiration for WINTER SOLDIER. I actually saw the Marvel movie before watching CONDOR and when I finally got around to seeing the earlier film, I was like, "Hey, this is familiar!"
I enjoy both versions, but I prefer the movie. I think that's mainly because I find the film's dialogue a lot snappier and more colorful (for example, one of my favorite moments, Roat's "me topsy, them turvey" speech, is not in the play). I also prefer Susy preparing for the hoods' final assault by herself rather than with Gloria as in the play, and I prefer the blocking during the climax in the movie: instead of sticking by the fridge while she has Roat tapping, Hepburn's Susy runs for the door and tries getting the chain loose; I also like how Roat loops the cane over Susy's neck to pull her over to him after he thinks he's won-- it's creative, creepy, and darkly humorous all at once.
However, the differences between the two are largely due to the difference between film and theater as mediums. A play can afford to be talkier, but movies tend to work best when they tell the narrative in a visual way. The movie cuts down a lot of the dialogue, opting to either open up the story (ex. seeing how Lisa gives the doll to Sam after seeing Roat at the airport) or portray certain elements through facial expression alone (ex. during the scene with Roat tapping, in the play he verbally taunts Susy before opening the fridge, while in the movie, the audience just gets a glimpse of his creepy, knowing grin in the quick flash of match light, no dialogue needed).
At any rate, I think the movie is a great example of taking a stage property and making it feel perfectly at home with cinematic storytelling.
(Kind of a late reply, but here's my two cents anyway.)
I always figured he planned on raping her before killing her. I mean, when he gets Susy to the bedroom threshold, he doesn’t start strangling her—if you look closely, he’s pulling her against his body and trying to maneuver her backwards into the room (presumably towards the bed itself) while keeping her in an embrace.
The movie builds Roat up as a predatory figure rather subtly in the first apartment scene: he sniffs Susy’s slip when he realizes just what he’s cleaning his glasses with, and Lisa’s clothes being pulled open like that suggests he did more than just kill her. It’s all pretty subtle by modern standards, but the implication is definitely there and it makes Roat’s behavior towards Susy all the more disturbing. If he wanted to just kill her, he could have just slit her throat in the kitchen, but he wanted to relish her suffering a bit longer before finishing the job.