Robert Harrington – The Magnificent 60s

You wouldn’t have figured Audrey Hepburn – she of the model looks (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961) and upmarket twang and belonging to the highest echelons of the movie business – for a Scream Queen. But there were precedents – Doris Day had at times been screaming fit to burst in Midnight Lace (1960) and Lee Remick, though not in either’s marquee league, had been terrified to bits in Experiment in Terror / The Grip of Fear (1962). By this point in pictures, the screen was awash with Scream Queens, courtesy of lower-budgeted efforts from Hammer, AIP and Amicus, so asking a top star to exercise her lungs in similar fashion might have been career suicide.

As it was, which would have come as a surprise to her legion of fans, this turned out to be pretty much the star’s swansong. She wouldn’t make another movie in nearly a decade and only another three after that. But here she certainly hits a dramatic peak.

The story’s a bit muddled and initially requires unraveling. Drug mule Lisa (Samantha Jones) passes a doll packed with heroin to fellow passenger Sam (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) on a plane. She had been planning to steal the dope and set up on her own with Mike (Richard Crenna) and former cop Carlino (Jack Weston). There’s a bit missing from the tale but you have to assume that somehow Lisa got talking to Sam and he gave her his address and that she has turned up at his apartment looking for the doll, which wasn’t there.

Mike and Carlino turn up and have no luck searching the apartment. They don’t look hard enough because if they’d looked in the closet they’d have found the corpse of Lisa, killed by her employer Roat (Alan Arkin) who arrives to confront the pair and then hire them to help him find the heroin and dispose of the body.

So with all that out of the way we come to the meat of the story. And it follows the same premise as Man in the Dark / Blind Corner (1964) – though, luckily, so few people saw that it wouldn’t be at the forefront of the audience mind at the time – of not so much a blind person being terrorized in their home but being largely played for a fool. The audience knows more than the blind person does and much of the story is not their vulnerability but just how long it will take for them to twig what’s going on.

In the case of Susy (Audrey Hepburn), as with the composer in Man in the Dark, her ears are her radar. She is on the alert after hearing the same pair of squeaky shoes on different people and wondering why people are opening and closing her blinds so often. Mike and Carlino masquerade as good guys, cops investigating the murder of Lisa for which her husband Sam is a suspect. She helps them tear apart the apartment looking for the doll.

She trusts Mike implicitly, less so Carlino, and when she starts to put two and two together she has an ally, teenager Gloria (Julie Herrod) who lives upstairs – they communicate like jailbirds by banging on the pipes. Although her eyes are denied sight, they still express her emotions – trust, relief, gratitude, fear.

But there’s not just one game of cat-and-mouse. There’s three. You know damn well that Mike and Carlino plan to squeeze Roat out of the equation just as you know damn well that he is planning to play them for patsies, apt to take revenge when double-crossed.

Gradually, her suspicions ramp up. She’s pretty smart working out the various clues. And then we hit two dramatic peaks. Firstly, when she discovers Mike is a bad guy. Secondly, when Roat kills Mike and turns on her, splashing petrol about the place, exploiting her terror of fire. She’s still got a couple of moves to turn the tables, at least temporarily but when absolute darkness does descend – she’s smashed all the lights out – and theoretically they are both in the same boat, and advantage her because of her keener hearing, it doesn’t quite work out the way she’s expected because he knows how to exploit sound.

I won’t tell you where the doll is hidden because that’s a very clever twist in itself, but apart from the few plotholes at the outset (how did Lisa manage to break into Susy’s apartment for a start and leave no trace, for example) once the narrative takes hold it exerts a very strong bite.

Audrey Hepburn is on top form. Alan Arkin (The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, 1966) and Jack Weston (Mirage, 1965) are a bit too obvious for me, but the smoother Richard Crenna (Marooned, 1969) is excellent.

Directed with both an eye to character and tension by Terence Young (Dr No, 1962) and adapted by Robert and Jane-Howard Carrington (Kaleidoscope, 1966) from the Broadway play by Frederick Knott (Dial M for Murder, 1954).

Top notch.

Amazing the tension that emanates from the turn of a card. Or, more correctly, waiting for one. Only problem is we’re two-third through the movie before high-stakes poker begins – the pot nudging £250,00 (close on a cool £5 million now). Mostly, the earlier tension derives from not knowing what the hell is going on in this enjoyable thriller made at the height of the Swinging Sixties as playboy gambler Barney (Warren Beatty), a walking Carnaby St model driving an Aston Martin DB5, tilts the odds dramatically in his favor.

Barney is a gambler but the problem with gambling is the odds. They can be against you too much. So Barney decides to turn himself into a burglar, the kind that can clamber over rooftops, abseil between buildings, and break into – a printing business called Kaleidoscope. This just happens to print the playing cards supplied to all the major European casinos. So Barney does a little doctoring of the master printing plates. Bingo, the odds are a bit more even now that he knows what cards are coming out of the shoe – he plays chemin de fer (as it is known in posh casinos, pontoon or 21 to you and me).

While cleaning up he bumps again into fashion designer Angel (Susannah York) – their original meet-cute taking place in a traffic jam – who he dated once in London. Unbeknownst to him, she is on a scouting mission, looking to snare the kind of high-rolling gambler who can take on and completely fleece the drugs kingpin Harry (Eric Porter) being pursued by cop Manny (Clive Revill), her father who, rather than waste so much time collecting the required evidence to put the villain behind bars, decides it would easier done by making him broke. Unable to pay his debts, some other villain would put him out of business in the traditional cemented-boot fashion.

It takes a while for the movie to line up all its ducks in a row, mainly by holding on to the information the audience requires. But the audience is privy to details of the way Manny works that Barney is not. Even for ruthless villains, Manny has a peculiar calling card, one that would make any gambler think twice about entering his lair. Of course, it doesn’t take long for Manny to rumble Barney’s game so the stakes are much higher than the charming gambler imagines.

Throw in as much fashion as London was capable of generating at this time, the burgeoning romance, some exotic European locations, a castle with a moat, and the usual tourist guide stuff of red buses, Big Ben, Piccadilly Circus, pubs and Tower Bridge and you have all the ingredients of an easy on the eye thriller.

It’s a movie that relies on star power but Beatty and York deliver. That is, if you don’t need Beatty to do much more than be Beatty, all teeth and charm. At this point in his career Beatty looked as if his career was fast approaching its end. The box office success of Splendor in the Grass (1961) had been followed by a string of flops, romantic dramas and comedies that should have had audiences queuing up plus an occasional wild card like Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965), the biggest flop of all. He does make an engaging crook, and he never loses his screen charisma here, but there ain’t quite the right number of twists that moviegoers weaned on the likes of Topkapi (1964) had come to expect.

Hollywood had been doing its best to position Susannah York as a top box office attraction and she had snagged the female lead in The 7^th Dawn (1964) opposite William Holden and Stanley Baker in Sands of the Kalahari (1965) but she was recovering from the colossal flop of Scruggs (1965) by ‘poet of the cinema’ David Hart. Kaleidoscope offered the kind of role York could do with her eyes closed. So while the screen pair were not exactly sleep-walking it was not the kind of story that was going to create sparks.

Character actor Clive Revill (Fathom, 1967) and Eric Portman (The Pumpkin Eater, 1964) take more leeway with their roles, the latter almost chewing he scenery, the former content with just chewing his lips. Look out for Jane Birkin (Blow-Up, 1966) and British television stalwarts Yootha Joyce, George Sewell and John Junkin.

The title would have been more enigmatic, original meaning of images twisted out of shape, had it not also applied, straightforwardly, to the card-making company. Giving Harry the surname of Dominion seems overkill.

Director Jack Smight (No Way to Treat a Lady, 1969) came to this after twisty private eye picture Harper/The Moving Target (1966), a big hit starring Paul Newman. This is too lightweight a feature to command such interest, but he does keep the story rolling along and it’s an effortless watch and it has a certain offbeat quality. The screenplay was fashioned by Robert Harrington and Jane-Howard Harrington, making their movie debut, who also co-wrote Wait until Dark (1967). It was also the debut for Winkast Productions, the Jerry Gershwin-Elliott Kastner production team who went on to make Where Eagles Dare (1968).

Tag: Robert Harrington

Wait Until Dark (1967) ****

Kaleidoscope (1966) ***