LAST OF THE RED HOT LOVERS 1972

I remember when I was a teenager, there used to be a radio station format called MOR, which stood for "middle of the road." And as the name suggests, these surprisingly popular stations catered to the seasoning-free music needs of its still market-significant 34 to 65 listening demographic--folks who were concerned that The Osmonds were beginning to sound a little too "street"--by playing inoffensive melodic pop, soft-rock, instrumentals, and standards (i.e., elevator music). It served as a counterprogramming response to the late-'60s rock, soul, and R&B revolution that emerged from the youth movement, drug culture, and changing socio-political climate.

Middle Man

I mention this because, when it comes to movies, I tend to forget that around this same time (roughly 1967 - 1978), Hollywood was in the midst of its own revolution, dubbed the New Hollywood. A revolution the floundering studios responded to with its own brand of MOR counterprogramming designed to satisfy the needs of the middle-age-bracket ticket-buyer who still saw movies as primarily a "family medium" and went to theaters for escapism, not significance.

In the years following the breakout success of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), a struggling film industry began aggressively courting the rapidly-growing youth market. Embracing unconventional films with topical themes, profanity, and graphic displays of sex, nudity, and violence. The goal was to attract audiences by offering them what they couldn't get on television. While Hollywood traditionalists balked at the newfound climate of permissiveness, the college-age demographic seized the marketplace. It was the disposable income of the young that turned offbeat, taboo-shattering films like Midnight Cowboy (1969), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Last Tango in Paris (1972) into major boxoffice hits.

Meanwhile, television remained the dominant entertainment choice for the dwindling 35 to 64-year-old market. But, when given the right G or GP-rated inducement, they proved their age bracket was still capable of showing up in significant enough numbers to make such old-fashioned (if not downright primordial) movies as Yours, Mine, & Ours (1968), The Love Bug (1969), and Airport (1970) some of the highest-grossing films of their respective years.

Stuck in the Middle with You

The "Hollywood Renaissance" era of the '70s is rightfully remembered for its creative daring and for producing groundbreaking films like The Graduate (1967), Klute (1971), and MASH (1970). But they are also the years when doggedly routine MOR comedies sought to straddle the fence through stories that looked at the rapidly-changing cultural landscape through a reactive, decidedly middle-aged (primarily male, always white) prism.  

The undisputed master of MOR movies at this time was the late Neil Simon. He built an entire career out of glorifying the middle-aged, middle-class everyman who's bewildered by a world that is changing too fast. Having begun his career writing for early TV (Your Show of Shows, The Phil Silvers Show), the prolific playwright, screenwriter, and Broadway golden boy was a master of sitcom plotting and gag-heavy humor. All of which reassured ticket buyers that a night out with a Neil Simon movie was a guaranteed risk-free, comfortingly familiar experience. Dubbed the "King of Kvetch Comedy" for almost a decade, Neil Simon had his finger on the arrhythmic pulse of America's "middlers"— folks too old for the Pepsi Generation but not yet ready to join the Geritol set. 

Barney's Queen of the Sea
Sweet, savory salmon saute swimming in salivary succulence 

But by 1972, when even TV sitcoms were beginning to adopt a hipper, more contemporary comedy style (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, and Maude all premiered between 1970 and 1972) and Simon--who turned 45 that year, the same age as the main character in Last of the Red Hot Lovers--found that his trademark jokey, setup-payoff style had begun to feel dated even to his core audience. Which perhaps explains why the audience that had helped turn his early screen adaptations Barefoot in the Park (1967) and The Odd Couple (1968) into boxoffice hits went largely MIA by the time Star Spangled Girl (1971) and Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972) came out. 

Alan Arkin as Barney Cashman

Sally Kellerman as Elaine Navazio

Paula Prentiss as Bobbi Michele

Renee Taylor as Jeanette Fisher

If Classical Hollywood's fumbling efforts to join the New Hollywood youthquake were a movie, that movie would be Neil Simon's Last of the Red Hot Lovers. It's the story of Barney Cashman. Balding, happily married, settled-in-his-ways, Barney Cashman, who wears a blue suit every day when he drives his black 4-door sedan from Great Neck to New York to open his seafood restaurant. The routine sameness of Barney's life has him, at age 45, both contemplating his mortality and grappling with the nagging certainty that on the battlefront of the '70s Sexual Revolution, God has classified him 4-F. 

It's Barney's deepest desire to have just one afternoon of "exciting" in a life that has thus far been one uninterrupted stream of "nice." Neil Simon's midlife-crisis comedy of bourgeois manners chronicles Barney's earnest but disastrous pursuit of the perfect Afternoon Delight. 

The Peacock Revolution
Along with everything else, men's fashion underwent an upheaval in the '70s.
Bold styling and vivid colors signified youth and sex appeal

Although a Tony Award-nominated hit when it opened on Broadway in 1969 (with James Coco in the lead), Last of the Red Hot Lovers —the 7th of Simon's plays to make it to the screen—hit theaters during a downtrend in Simon's career and, like Star Spangled Girl before it, opened to terrible reviews and non-existent business. By the time it was released on VHS in the early '80s (when I saw it), it had earned the reputation of being the most missable of Simon's screen adaptations. 

So wouldn't you know it...coming to Last of the Red Hot Lovers with rock-bottom expectations and the participation of faves Paula Prentiss and Sally Kellerman as my sole interest, I wound up laughing louder, longer, and more frequently at LOTRHL than any other Neil Simon film I'd seen to date. That was more than 40 years ago. Today, even after multiple revisits,  Last of the Red Hot Lovers still remains my #1 favorite Neil Simon stage-to-screen adaptation.

Barney Whips Out His Schtick
The comedy in Last of the Red Hot Lovers is from a time when the mere sight of a middle-aged man in boxer shorts (37-year-old Arkin shaved his head to play 45) was considered a sure-fire laugh-getter 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM     

The obvious reason I love Last of the Red Hot Lovers is that it makes me laugh. A lot. What's not so obvious is why. It's not like I'm blind to the film's numerous shortcomings: Neal Hefti's oddly dispiriting musical score; director Gene Saks' (Mame) pedestrian approach to the material (it looks like a TV movie that ran into budget trouble); and the overall sense that the film's premise is too thin to support the level of repetition imposed upon it by its "comic triple" structure.

For those unfamiliar, the Comic Triple is the ages-old comedy writing principle that says things are funnier in threes. A setup built around - 1. normal, 2. normal, 3. surprise! 

A typical example is this exchange from Young Frankenstein (1974)-co-written by Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks: 

1. "Would the doctor care for a brandy before retiring?"

    - "No. Thank you."

2. "Some warm milk, perhaps?"

    - "No. Thank you very much. No, thanks."

3. "Ovaltine?"

Like Simon's earlier play Plaza Suite, Last of the Red Hot Lovers has a "3-in-One" structure (three one-act playlets united by the same male lead) that turns the film itself into a Comic Triple. But 98 minutes was an awfully long time to wait for a punchline for some.  

(Mel Brooks and Neil Simon were friends who both started as writers for Your Show of Shows in the '50s. Only a year apart in age, Simon never really shed his status as the comic darling of the blue-hair set, but Mel Brooks' broad farces and satirical movie homages struck a chord with young audiences and came to influentially exemplify the look of hip, college-crowd comedy in the '70s.)  

It's All in the Writing / It's All in the Casting
Simon's jokes hit most of the time. But for me, Arkin, Kellerman, Prentiss, and Taylor bat it clear out of the park with every swing. Seeing what these quirky, broke-the-mold character actors do with Simon's set-in-aspic material is why this movie is such a favorite

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

In Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Barney Cashman's failed trio of trysts in the New York apartment of his 73-year-old mother (empty two days a week from 3 to 5 when she's out doing volunteer work at Mount Sinai) begins in the winter of his discontent and continues through summer and fall. Making him a sort of frustrated man for all seasons. Each encounter brings about subtle changes in Barney, which should have a unifying effect and make the film feel more like a single narrative. Alas, the variance in tone and pacing of these sequences felt less like watching a movie with a cohesive plotline and more like watching the isolated sequences in an episode of Love, American Style.    

LOVE AND THE SENSUOUS WOMAN

"I get cravings. To eat, to touch, to smell, to see, to do.
A physical, sensual pleasure that can only be satisfied at that particular moment."

The first sequence is the most quintessentially Simonesque of all the episodes. A machine-gun barrage of wisecracks and one-liners delivered with surprising comic panache by an amusingly salty Sally Kellerman with a prototypically subdued Alan Arkin – the master of comic stillness – playing straight man. The occasion of two married people agreeing to meet for an afternoon of no-strings adultery has Simon applying his The Odd Couple formula of close-quarters dissimilarity-conflict to an unforeseen obstacle: anxious Barney is looking for romance while illusion-free Elaine ("A coughing woman of Polish persuasion") is looking for sex. 

What should be a semantic non-issue becomes a Wall of Jericho as Barney's stubborn need to justify his infidelity with sentimentality finds no common ground with Elaine's clear-eyed sexual pragmatism. Behind the witty barbs and comebacks in their talking-in-circles banter lies a sharp discourse about the death of romance in the age of Deep Throat and Portnoy's Complaint (two films that came out the same summer as Last of the Red Hot Lovers).

In her 2013 memoir, Sally Kellerman cited her performance in Last of the Red Hot Lovers as her proudest career accomplishment, which I'm in absolute agreement with. Reminding me of one of those silent wives in a Martin Scorsese mob movie, Kellerman's hard-edged Elaine Navazio is a standout and my favorite performance of her career. The writing in this sequence is perhaps the tightest and funniest, and Kellerman has a great comedy rhythm with Arkin (the two would team again in 1975's Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins).  

What hasn't been as obvious to me until multiple revisits is how hilariously in character Arkin's underplaying is. His performance is infused with dozens of small bits of business (the running gag of his non-drinker's reaction to drinking, for example) that not only set up and support Kellerman's jokes beautifully, but nicely establish many of Barney's behavioral details that pay off in latter sequences to illustrate his evolution as a red hot lover.

LOVE AND THE ACTRESS

"I don't need their stinkin' show. I'm more of a movie personality. 
Barbra Streisand, Ali MacGraw... that's the type I am."

The first playlet ended with Barney emphatically vowing "I will never, never, never do that again." In this chapter, which stands as the requisite "silly" episode in Neil Simon's 3-act formula (remember that passed-out hooker storyline in California Suite?), we learn that "never' for Barney is about six months. It's summer, and having shed his romantic illusions along with his winter suit, Barney is again inspired to entertain a young woman in his mother's apartment. This time it's Bobbi Michele (Prentiss), the "theatrically built" actress-singer he meets in the park. 
From Barney's outside-looking-in perspective on the sexual revolution, Bobbi represents all those beautiful, long-legged, mini-skirted, sexually-uninhibited women Barney sees and fantasizes about on the streets and staring out at him from the covers of sexy magazines. That she turns out to be Grade-A Looney Tunes turns their afternoon into a "be careful what you wish for" male midlife-crisis cautionary tale.

I'm a huge admirer of the woefully underappreciated Paula Prentiss, so I feign no objectivity when I say she's hysterically funny in this essentially made-to-order role. Not a popular performance even among many of her fans, but I find her brilliant. No one does kooky-sexy like Prentiss, her distinctive delivery and impeccable timing work to make the comedy in this sequence feel almost absurdist.

LOVE AND THE TIMES WE LIVE IN

Jeanette - "You're not appalled by the times that we live in? The promiscuity you find everywhere?"
Barney - "I haven't found it anywhere! I hear a lot about it, but I haven't found it!"

Last of the Red Hot Lovers gets a bit serious in this final installment. A family friend whose husband is having an affair (Taylor) plummets into a deep depression and solicits the by-now practically predatory Barney for an ill-advised revenge dalliance. In the course of trying to seduce the woman after she's already expressed she's having second thoughts, Barney has a Willy Loman moment where he's confronted with his moral hypocrisy and the very real possibility that he may not be the decent man he prides himself on being. Amidst this, the film seems to make the questionable (but no doubt comforting) leap that before the sexual revolution introduced so many gray areas, America was a bastion of heterosexual monogamy. Conveniently ignoring the decades of smutty sex comedies (some written by Simon himself) satirizing the morality of suburban bed-hopping.  

In later years, Neil Simon would improve at balancing comedy-drama. But this third act episode, which has Simon's characters dealing with some pretty hard-hitting truths, is written to be the broadest, most farcical sequence of them all. 

Perhaps on stage, it came off better. But with the intimacy of the movie screen, the skill of Renee Taylor's performance only emphasizes the sequence's whiplash shifts in tone. (Taylor is superb. How she manages to be screamingly funny one minute and heart-breakingly real the next is remarkable.) Does it make me laugh? Yes. Between the running gags of Jeanette's handbag and her retreats to the coffee shop, it has me in stitches. Does it work? Intermittently I'd say. 

Once again, I call attention to how good Alan Arkin is, and in this sequence, he has to work with coming off as kind of creepy and unsympathetic. But both actors redeem the material's shortcomings through the authenticity of their characterizations.

Looking like a flesh and blood Boris Badenov,
incognito Barney tries to make it to his mother's apartment unnoticed

As a journalist noted at the time, Last of the Red Hot Lovers is a sad comedy about a genuine cultural phenomenon of the time: the youthquake era was the first time adults didn't look to their elders for guidance on how to live their lives, they looked to the young.

It's hard to know what being middle-aged must have felt like at a time when so much of life around you seemed to be in flux for only the young, but everyone can relate to feeling left out, feeling as though you're missing out, or that the parade is passing by. With Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Neil Simon takes a witty and insightful stab at exploring the experience of a character who had to go too far to learn that being in the middle wasn't so bad.

Clip from "Last of the Red Hot Lovers"  1972

BONUS MATERIAL

Iconic Looks - The Lynx Fur Coat 

I really love the look of Sally Kellerman's Elaine in Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Especially her enormous fur coat. As character-defining costuming goes, the lynx fur coat worked overtime in the '60s and '70s. I don't know if they ever went through a phase when they were considered sincerely chic or glamorous. But whenever a character is sporting one in a movie, it always seems to serve as a signifier of a certain kind of brassy, East Coast vulgarity. Living in California, I don't think I've ever seen one in person, but my first screen lynx sighting was in 1967's Wait Until Dark when it was worn by street-savvy heroin smuggler Samantha Jones (bottom). Next, in 1970s The Owl and the Pussycat, Barbra Streisand's model/actress wore her omnipresent faux fur coat like it was sex-worker armor.  

Sally Kellerman (June 2, 1937 - February 24, 2022)

The recent death of actress Sally Kellerman is what inspired me to re-watch Last of the Red Hot Lovers. In her 2013 memoir Read My Lips, she cites her performance in the film as one of her proudest accomplishments, and I can't help but agree. The first thing I ever saw Kellerman in was an episode of the Marlo Thomas sitcom That Girl titled "Break a Leg." It was broadcast Thursday, November 10, 1966, and it made an impression on me because I had a 4th-grade teacher I had a crush on who looked just like Kellerman in this episode. Although her most famous role (Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan) is from a film I really can't stand (Robert Altman's M*A*S*H), I loved Sally Kellerman in Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975), Slither (1973), Foxes (1980), Brewster McCloud (1970), and even 1973's Lost Horizon.

Neil Simon: Voice of the Urban Underdog

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2022

WAIT UNTIL DARK 1967

Before there really was such a thing as a high-concept movie, in 1967 Warner Bros. released this doozy of a nail-biter whose intriguingly unorthodox casting and high-concept thriller premise resulted in lines around the block and a boxoffice ranking as the 16th highest-grossing film of the year. The film: Wait Until Dark. The casting: All the heavies are played by actors best known for comedy roles. The concept: Somebody wants to kill Holly Golightly!

Audrey Hepburn as Susy Hendrix

Alan Arkin as Harry Roat, Jr.

Richard Crenna as Mike Talman

Jack Weston as Sgt. Carlino

Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Sam Hendrix

As if drawn to the theater for the collective purpose of forming a militia in her defense, sixties audiences—long-accustomed to spending a pleasant evening being charmed by the winsome, doe-eyed, Belgian gamine of Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany's—turned out in droves to witness Hepburn as a defenseless blind woman tormented by a gang of sleazy, drug-dealing, New York thugs. The Old-Hollywood zeitgeist had shifted in a big way! And if you don’t think placing cinema’s much-beloved eternal ingénue within harm’s way is a concept both incendiary and controversial, you must have missed the 2010 online war raged against Emma Thompson when she dared to utter but a few disparaging remarks about everyone’s favorite sylphlike waif.
Thompson, at the time writing a since-shelved remake of My Fair Lady, drew the heated ire of millions when she expressed the opinion that Hepburn couldn't sing and “Can’t really act.” Ignorant or indifferent to the fact that, at least on this side of the pond, anyone trash-talking Audrey Hepburn is just begging for a major ass-whippin’; Thompson made herself no friends in Hepburn camps. There's no reason to believe there's any connection between this public outcry and the fact that Thompson's My Fair Lady re-up hit a snag, but if there’s one thing Audrey Hepburn elicits from movie fans, it’s the near-unanimous desire to shield and protect her. A quality exploited to entertainingly nerve-racking effect in Wait Until Dark.

"What did they want with her?"
Poster art for Wait Until Dark prominently featured the image of a screaming Audrey Hepburn accompanied by the above tagline.  Yikes!

From the moment I first saw her in Roman Holiday, I've always thought of Audrey Hepburn’s screen persona as akin to that of a butterfly. A creature so exquisitely fragile and beautiful that you couldn't bear seeing harm come to it. Sure, Hepburn was drolly menaced in Charade, and most certainly, pairing the then 27-year-old Hepburn with 57-year-old Fred Astaire in Funny Face constitutes some form of romantic terrorism; but for the most part, Audrey Hepburn has always seemed to me to be a woman far too adorable and classy for anybody to mess with.

That being said, I don’t number myself among her fans who would have been happy to have seen her continue along the path of taking on the same role in film after film. When Hepburn made the heist comedy How to Steal a Million in 1966, she was 36 years old, a wife and mother, yet still playing the sort of girlish role she virtually trademarked in the fifties. While that particular comedy revealed Hepburn in fine form and as radiant as ever, it was nevertheless becoming clear that in a world that was making way for Barbarella, Bonnie Parker, and Myra Breckinridge; it was high time for the Cinderella pixie image to be laid to rest.

Taking on the role of the tormented blind woman in Wait Until Dark was a concentrated effort on Hepburn's part to broaden her range and break the mold of her ingénue image. Earlier that same year Hepburn appeared to spectacular effect opposite Albert Finney in Stanley Donen’s bittersweet look at a troubled marriage, Two for the Road. Giving perhaps the most nuanced, adult performance of her career, Hepburn in modern mode revealed a surprising depth of emotional maturity that signaled, at least for a time, she might be one of the few Golden Age Hollywood stars able to make the transition to the dressed-down '70s. While Two for the Road ultimately proved too arty and downbeat for popular tastes, Wait Until Dark was a resounding boxoffice success and garnered the Oscar-winning actress her fifth Academy Award nomination.

Wait Until Dark was adapted from the hit 1966 Broadway play by Frederick Knott (Dial M for Murder) which starred Lee Remick in the role that won her a Best Actress Tony nomination. Recreating the role she originated on Broadway, actress Julie Harrod (above) portrays Gloria, the bratty but ultimately resourceful upstairs neighbor.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I really love a good thriller. And good thrillers are awfully hard to come by these days. When a suspense thriller succeeds in its objectives to send a chill up my spine, keep me guessing, or, better yet, induce me to spend a restless evening sleeping with all the lights on…well, I’m pretty much putty in its hands and will willingly follow where I’m led. Wait Until Dark does a marvelous job of duplicating the formula that worked so well for Ira Levin in both Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, two of my all-time favorite suspense thrillers. Wait Until Dark takes a vulnerable female character (a woman recently blinded in a car accident, just learning to adapt to her loss of sight); pits her against an enemy whose degree of malevolence and severity of intent she is slow to recognize (Susy is the unwitting possessor of a heroin-filled doll her tormentors are willing to kill for); and (most importantly) takes the time to develop its characters and methodically build suspense so as to best to encourage empathy and audience identification. Simple in structure, yet rare in its ability to sustain tension while providing plenty of nightmare fodder, Wait Until Dark is one of those scary movies that still packs a punch even after repeat viewings.

When it comes to strict adherence to logic, most psychological thrillers don't hold up to too-close scrutiny. Wait Until Dark is no exception. Plot points and theatrical devices that play well on the stage don't always translate to the hyper-realistic world of motion pictures. But when a thriller is as fast-paced and full of spook-house fun as Wait Until Dark, head-scratchers like the one above (I won't give anything away, you'll have to see the film) won't hit you until long after your pulse has returned to normal and the film has ended. 

PERFORMANCES

A while back I wrote about how refreshing it was to see Elizabeth Taylor tackle her first suspense thriller with 1973’s Night Watch. In thinking back to 1967 and my first time seeing Audrey Hepburn’s genre debut in Wait Until Dark, the word that comes to mind is traumatizing. Yes, it was quite the shock seeing MY Audrey Hepburn keeping such uncouth company and being treated so loutishly in a film without benefit of a Cary Grant or Givenchy frock for consolation. Like everybody else, I had fallen in love with Audrey Hepburn’s frail vulnerability in Funny Face and My Fair Lady, so seeing her brutalized for a good 90 minutes was a good deal more than I was ready for at the tender age of ten. 

Javier Bardem's creepy psychopath of No Country for Old Men owes perhaps a nod to Alan Arkin's equally tonsorially-challenged, undies-sniffing nutjob in Wait Until Dark. 

Over the years, my shock over Hepburn’s deviation from type has given way to an appreciation of the skill of her performance here. Actors never seem to be given the proper credit for the realistic conveyance of fear and anxiety, yet I can't think of a single thriller or horror film that has ever worked for me if the lead is unable to convince me that he/she is in genuine fear for their life. Audrey Hepburn delves deep into her somewhat underwritten character and makes her more than just a "lady in peril." She authentically conveys her character's mounting apprehension and fearful response to the circumstances she finds herself facing, yet never abandons the innate resourcefulness that has already been established as part of this woman's makeup as a survivor. 

Hepburn is the emotional linchpin of the entire movie, and she is incredibly affecting and sympathetic. Without benefit of those expressive eyes of hers (she somehow allows them to go blank, yet finds ways to have all manner of complex emotions play out over her face and through her body language) Hepburn keeps us locked within the reality of the film. Even when the plot takes a few turns into the improbable (once again, my lips are sealed!). 

Sixties model Samantha Jones (yes, Sex and the City fans, there IS a real one) plays Lisa, the inadvertent catalyst for all the trouble that erupts in Wait Until Dark. Jones' fabulously '60s big-hair, big-fur, slightly cheap glamour seems to have been borrowed by Barbra Streisand's working girl ("I may be a prostitute, but I'm not promiscuous!") in 1970s The Owl and the Pussycat.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Having been born too late to experience the mayhem attendant the release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho with that famed shower scene, I'm therefore thrilled to have had the experience of actually seeing Wait Until Dark during its original theatrical run, when exhibitors turned out all of the theater lights during the film's final eight minutes. Jesus H. Christ! Such a thunderous chorus of screams I'd never heard before in my life! My older sister practically kicked the seat in front of her free of its moorings. At least I think so. I was on the ceiling at the time. Without giving anything away, I'll just say that while that experience has since been duplicated at screenings I've attended of the films Jaws, The Omen, Carrie, and Alien; it has never been equaled. At least not in my easily-rattled book.

I hope William Castle appreciated the irony
At the exact moment director William Castle - the great-granddad of horror gimmickry - was making a bid for legitimacy with Rosemary's Baby, Wait Until Dark, a major motion picture with an A-list cast, was attracting rave notices and sellout crowds employing a promotional gambit straight out of his B-movie marketing playbook.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Audrey Hepburn ventured into the damsel-in-distress realm just once more in her career (with this film's director, Terence Young, no less). Unfortunately, it was in the jumbled mess that was Bloodline (1979). An absolutely dreadful and nonsensical film I've seen, oh, about 7 times. As theatrical thrillers go, Wait Until Dark is not up there with Sleuth or Deathtrap in popularity, but it does get revived now and then. Most recently, a poorly-received 1998 Broadway version with Marisa Tomei and Quentin Tarantino, of all people. In 1982 there was a cable-TV adaptation starring Katherine Ross and Stacy Keach that I actually recall watching, but, perhaps tellingly, I can't remember a single thing about.

As a kid, I only knew Jack Weston from the silly comedies Palm Springs Weekend and The Incredible Mr. Limpett. Richard Crenna I knew from TV sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks and The Real McCoys. Producer Mel Ferrer (Mr. Audrey Hepburn at the time) is credited with casting these two talented actors against type to refreshingly unsettling effect

When people speak of Wait Until Dark, it is invariably the Audrey Hepburn version that's referenced, and it's this film to which all subsequent adaptations, like it or not, must be compared. Even when removed from the fun exploitation gimmick of the darkened theater and the novelty of seeing Hepburn in an atypical, non-romantic role, Wait Until Dark holds up remarkably well. Delivering healthy doses of edge-of-the-seat suspense and jump-out-of-your-seat surprises, it's a solid, well-crafted thriller with a talented cast delivering first-rate performances (save for Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who just does his usual, bland, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.thing).
Still, it's Audrey Hepburn—age 37, inching her way toward adult roles— who is the real marvel here. Being a movie star of the old order, one whose stock-in-trade has been the projection of her personality upon every role; Hepburn is never fully successful in making us stop thinking at times as if we're watching Tiffany's Holly Golightly, Charade's Regina Lampert, or Roman Holiday's Princess Ann caught up in some Alice-through-the-looking-glass nightmare. But in these days of so-called "movie stars" who scarcely register anything onscreen beyond their own narcissism, I'm afraid I'm going to favor the actress whose sweetly gentle nature has shone through in every role she's ever assumed. That's a real and genuine talent, in and of itself.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2013