I Fell In Love : Wait Until Dark

After a few years I went to an auditorium today to watch a movie (Wait Until Dark). It's a movie I had heard a lot about. 

The lead character is the amazingly cute Suzy (Audrey Hepburn). Suzy is blind and married to Sam, a photographer. The story starts with a woman who smuggles heroin (hidden inside a baby doll) into the US from Canada. When the woman lands at JFK airport, she sees someone she doesn't want to see and hence gives the doll to an unsuspecting fellow passenger, Sam who is Suzy's (Audrey Hepburn) husband.

Mr Roat, a cold blooded thug, kills the woman smuggler (who is his wife actually) because he feels that his is woman was double crossing him. He hides the woman's body in a closet inside Suzy's apartment. He blackmails/employs two other shady characters (Mike and Sergeant) to 

• find the doll which he is sure is inside Suzy's apartment somewhere, but he doesn't know exactly where and
• to take the body of the murdered woman which is inside the apartment and to dump it outside somewhere.

I think about 60 minutes of the movie (which is about 90 minutes long) is shot inside Suzy's apartment. Suzy's husband Sam has a photo shootout appointment away from home until late at night and so he isn't home the entire evening - this shootout having been arranged by Mr Roat so as to keep Sam away. 

Earlier in the day Suzy hears of the murder of a woman whose body was found in the parking lot outside her apartment. She doesn't know that the woman was murdered inside her own flat. She mentions the body and the murder to Sam who doesn't take it too seriously. Sam expects Suzy to be a heroine. Perhaps to be the most capable blind lady in the whole world.

Mr Roat and the two characters employed by him keep knocking on the door of Suzy's apartment the entire evening and getting inside on some pretext or the other cooking up stories. Their job is to locate the doll. One of the two characters (Mike) ingratiates himself as Sam's old friend. Suzy trusts Mike completely during those few hours. 

Suzy is bewildered as one story weaved to her by these three characters is that her husband has been having an affair with another woman whose doll Sam had brought home. And that it's the same woman whose body was found in the parking lot. The three men try to badger her into telling them where the doll is. They tell her that if the police find the doll, then her husband would surely be under suspicion of having murdered the woman (Mrs Roat).

The rest of the story is about the rest of the evening and how a blind frail (did I mention very cute?) woman tackles the three gangsters with the help of a young neighbor, Gloria.

What is fascinating is how the director creates scenes where the blind woman puts a dangerous criminal on the defensive. 

I can't help but connect the character of Suzy to that of Lucy (Kate Nelligan) in the movie Eye of the Needle. Lucy is another frail but extraordinarily tough character who murders Die Nadel, the villain (Donald Sutherland).

Wait Until Dark is amazing. A lovely movie. I fell in love.