Wait Until Dark (1967, Terence Young) (Patreon)

61/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. Fired this up literally within five minutes of learning that Arkin had died—the news happened to break late at night Pacific time, right as I was sitting down to watch something else (don't recall what now), and I called an audible. Had somehow misremembered it as an entire movie's worth of Audrey Hepburn being terrorized in the dark, which doesn't even make sense...though, frankly, Knott's actual scenario doesn't make a whole lotta sense either. With some effort, I can rationalize Harry Roat, Jr. donning multiple disguises to hoodwink a blind woman; seems unnecessary to ensure that a neighbor who sees him in the hallway or something will give the real police an account that matches Susy's, but some people are ultra-cautious like that. The bad guys' macroscopic plan, however, basically requires them to, y'know, write (and/or improvise) an entire hit Broadway play, complete with endless entrances and exits and precisely timed phone calls, to be performed for an audience of one. It's all a tad ludicrous, albeit generally entertaining; Dial M for Murder does a better job of making multiple convolutions seem organic, in part because we get to see so much of the reasoning occur in real time. Anyway, Arkin's genuinely intimidating at the beginning and end, using his Brooklyn-Jewish nasal deadpan as a weapon in a way that I'm not sure he ever repeated. It's a significantly smaller role than I'd thought, and Roat playing other characters tends to diminish him (it's as if we saw Reservoir Dogs' bank robbery and Mr. Blonde had initially posed as an elderly librarian), but Arkin's sadistic sangfroid nicely offsets Hepburn's realistically terrified histrionics, with Crenna occupying a comparatively nondescript but nonetheless crucial middle ground. Not my favorite performance of his, by any means, but it's a shame that he didn't further explore this counterintuitive aspect of his persona. Feels to me as if Yossarian's wry bewilderment kinda stuck with him forever after.  R.I.P., sir.