From the very first minute you start watching 'Wait Until Dark', you know that something is going to fail miserably. The opening shot is just fabulous, in which Samantha Jones leaves her downtown Montreal place with a dope-filled little doll, intending to smuggle it to New York. After we hear Henry Mancini's eerie title tune, and we are already in New York, we are certain that something, is indeed, going to go wrong for one of the characters. Jones sees a mean looking, scenery-chewing, cool ol' Alan Arkin watching her ... she runs to this man that she met on the airplane, and gives him the doll, bumbling some senseless excuse, and runs off to encounter her cruel destiny... That's when we meet Jones's ex-partners in crime, con-men Weston and Crenna, going to this New York apartment in St. Luke's Place, thinking they will meet her again - but they meet Arkin, instead, who is eager to find the doll and will stop at nothing to obtain it. Both are invited by Arkin to work for him, in finding the doll. They accept, only to find that that was not Samantha's place at all, that was the apartment of the man in the airplane - to whom Samantha gave the doll away - and his blind wife Audrey, and Samatha was dead inside the couple's closet! Weston and Crenna try to escape, but Arkin blackmails them into doing the job, since their finger-prints were all over the place. So, they quickly concoct a complicated plot to make Suzy give the doll away, while her husband's at Asbury Park, working. What follows is a gathering of great performances, and a series of truly frightening moments, building up to the shocking, nail-biting, right-up-the-wall driving climax. After it, you will just want to to light a cigarette, roll over and fall asleep... listening to Mancini's gentle love theme, 'Wait Until Dark'...
Review of Wait Until Dark
