'WAIT UNTIL DARK' & '23 PACES TO BAKER STREET'.....AUDREY & VAN PLAY BLIND MAN'S BLUFF....

             When a writer or director of thrillers puts a blind person in harm's way, they run the risk of having it look like a lazy cheap ploy to goose their audience with dread-filled suspense. To avoid such a pitfall, the film or play involved will normally fashion its sightless hero (or heroine) as a brave, resourceful individual, capable of using their handicap to outwit their murderous adversaries.

              It so happened that the BQ renewed its friendly acquaintance with two such movies. A little over a decade separates them, but they're still remarkably similar to each other.....they share almost identical climaxes.   The expected major difference is the jump in the violence level from 1956 to 1967.  The earlier film, from a kinder, gentler age, holds its mayhem down to standard Hollywood studio levels. The later film embraces the 1960's new infatuation with psychotic, nihilistic villainy and unflinching on-screen brutality.

             23 Paces To Baker Street (1956), sturdily and solidly directed by old hand Henry Hathaway, is a flavorful, Hollywood-ized version of a fog-shrouded, stiff-upper-lip, old fashioned British murder mystery. (And far from the only film in this curious mash-up genre, others included John Huston's "The List Of Adrian Messenger" and the Doris Day vehicle "Midnight Lace") Shot on the 20th Century Fox backlot, but filled with sumptuous shots of the Thames and Parliament. the plot has an embittered blind American playwright (the ever likable Van Johnson) overhearing a child-kidnap conspiracy while in a pub. (Hathaway pulls off this key sequence with great Hitchcockian aplomb....with Van struggling to hear the conspirators over the noise of a pinball machine)

             The British detectives don't give Van much help, even though, with his playwright's ear for dialogue and crackerjack memory, he's recorded his own dramatic reading of the furtive pubsters' conversation on the reel-to-reel machine he uses to dictate his plays. With help of his manservant (the throaty, stiff-upper-Brit Cecil Parker)and his still-pining-for-him ex-fiance (Vera Miles), Van snaps out of his self-pitying funk and sets out to thwart the would-be kid-snatchers.  The leader of this gang, a particularly nasty, mysterioso  'Mr Evans'  comes gunning for Van at the finale.....in which Van evens up the playing field by first smashing all the lights in his apartment.....

             If that sighted-murderer-vs-plucky-blind-person showdown sounds familiar, that's because a more extended, sadistic and scary version of it turns up in Wait Until Dark (1967)  Based on a hit Broadway play by Frederick Knott ('Dial M For Murder'), it's a distinctly unnerving one-room piece centered on a heartbreakingly vulnerable blind woman (who else but the heartbreakingly vulnerable Audrey Hepburn). She spends a harrowing day and night terrorized by a trio of crooks searching for a stash of drugs left in the her apartment by one of their cohorts.
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            Two of this trio (Jack Weston, Richard Crenna) are simply garden variety con men.  Their leader however, Harry Roat Jr. from Scarsdale, as frighteningly played by Alan Arkin, is another nightmare altogether......a soulless, dead-eyed, knife wielding psychopath. Arkin inhabits this hellish character with such reptilian force, he creates one of the screen's most disturbing embodiments of pure, unadulterated evil. No mere crook, Roat is nothing less than a bottomless abyss of inhumanity.....and you quake for poor Audrey's welfare all through the film.

            As in "23 Paces To Baker Street", Hepburn and Arkin ultimately face off for a goosebump-raising,  lights-out duel in the apartment (only after Audrey, following Van's playbook, has smashed all the bulbs...or so she thinks). The film goes all out in this regard, tossing in the first official  lift-you-out-of-your-seat jump scare in a major Hollywood feature. (Warner Brothers encouraged theater owners to amp up the audience terror during this sequence by shutting off the emergency/exit lights, plunging the auditoriums into total blackness. Any studio suggesting that stunt in this day and age would probably accrue  about 200 million in Fire Marshall fines...)

             Which of these blindingly suspenseful movies would the BQ recommend?  We found plenty of enjoyment in both, each very much representative of their eras. The villain reveal in "23 Paces" is perfunctory and not that big a surprise if you're a good guesser.....but it's in keeping with  the film's 1950's meat 'n potatoes standardization. So we'll say 3 stars. (***)  "Wait Until Dark", offering the luminous Audrey Hepburn and the bone-chilling work of Alan Arkin, earns a full BQ 5 stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS.  Don't forget to keep the lights on......