I’ll be chopped up into little pieces and end up all over the river. Montreal Airport: Lisa (Samantha Jones) takes a flight from to New York City, smuggling bags of heroin sewn inside an old-fashioned doll. When she disembarks, she becomes worried on seeing a man (Alan Arkin) watching her from the airport roof. She gives the doll to a fellow passenger, professional photographer Sam Hendrix (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.), for safekeeping. She is roughly escorted away by the other man. A few days later, con artists Mike Talman (Richard Crenna) and Carlino (Jack Weston) a crooked NYPD cop, arrive at the Greenwich Village apartment of Sam, recently married to Susy (Audrey Hepburn), who was newly blinded in an accident, believing it to be Lisa’s place. Harry Roat, the man who met Lisa at the airport, arrives to persuade Talman and Carlino to help him find the doll. After the con men discover Lisa’s body hanging in a wardrobe in Susy’s apartment, Roat blackmails them into helping him dispose of it and convinces them to help him find the doll. While Sam is on an assignment, the criminals begin an elaborate con using Susy’s blindness against her and posing as different people to win her trust. Implying that Lisa has been murdered and that Sam will be suspected, the men persuade Susy to help them find the doll. Mike, posing as Sam’s old army buddy using information gleaned from his previous recce, gives her the number for the phone booth across the street as his own after falsely warning her of a police car outside the basement apartment. Gloria (Julie Herrod) a girl who lives in an upstairs apartment and who had borrowed the doll without permission, sneaks in to return it. She reveals to Susy that there is no police car outside. After calling Mike and realising it’s the phone booth’s number, Susy figures out that the three men are criminals and hides the doll. She tells them it’s at Sam’s studio and the three leave after Roat cuts the telephone line. Carlino stays behind to stand guard outside the building. Susy sends Gloria to the bus station to wait for Sam. When she finds out that the telephone cord has been cut, she prepares to defend herself by breaking all the lightbulbs in the apartment except for the safelight. When did you figure it out about me? When Mike returns, he realises that she knows the truth and demands the doll but she refuses to cooperate. He tells her that he has sent Carlino to kill Roat. Having anticipated their plan, Roat has killed Carlino instead, and then kills Mike on the doorstep of Susy’s apartment, his body falling down the stairs. Intent on acquiring the doll, Roat threatens to set the apartment on fire … Do I have to be the world’s champion blind lady? Alfred Hitchcock said you acquire a play for its construction and he should know. He developed Dial M For Murder by Frederick Knott with great success (especially for his new muse Grace Kelly) and this similar chamber piece by Knott was a huge Broadway hit starring Lee Remick that became a vehicle for Audrey Hepburn with her husband Mel Ferrer in the producer’s seat (a situation that apparently contributed to the end of their already fraught union). Warner Bros. had bought the property prior to its Broadway success so convinced were they of its possibilities but according to her biographer Alexander Walker, Hepburn wanted her participation announced quickly to avoid the situation she’d endured with My Fair Lady when she was accused of stealing the lead from an untested Julie Andrews so discussions were going on prior to the production of How To Steal a Million in 1965. For tax reasons Hepburn wanted to shoot in Europe but that preference and her wish to be costumed by Givenchy was knocked on the head. Initially the aforementioned Hitchcock was mooted as possible director but he immediately rejected the studio’s offer because of Hepburn’s leaving No Bail for the Judge half a dozen years earlier when she wouldn’t agree to the inclusion of a violent rape scene and the project remained unmade. Thus charming British James Bond helmer Terence Young, who a teenage Hepburn had helped escape from Holland when he was shot down during the war, was in the director’s chair. Hepburn prepared meticulously for the role, visiting a clinic for the blind in Lausanne and continuing at the Lighthouse Clinic in New York where some of the film was made (as well as in Toronto) prior to shooting at Warners’ Burbank studio in Hollywood. For all of Hepburn’s detailed physical work, she ended up having to wear hard contact lenses to cover up her inimitably sparkling eyes, removing at least one of her trademarks which cinematographer Charles Lang did his best to illuminate. In a way this is a fraternal (or sororal) twin to the setup in Hepburn’s comic thriller Charade, with three men after something Hepburn doesn’t know she possesses. This thriller as adapted by husband and wife screenwriting team Robert Carrington & Jane-Howard Carrington has no comedy elements however and the premise starts by setting up a drug smuggling story in Canada with a deliriously beautiful woman (model Jones) who will eventually be found dead in one deeply awful moment of discovery: first when she’s seen by Mike and then when Susy puts on her scarf and unwittingly disturbs the dead woman’s hair. It’s a perverse sign of things to come. Arkin’s splashy star-making triple role of the various Roat characters might logically be questioned – how can our blind protagonist spot the difference? (She notes the commonality, in fact). Roat dispenses with his goons as expected and they are performed exceedingly well by the charming Crenna and compelling Weston, both of whom exhibit traces of guilt and fear. Damn it, you act as if you’re in kindergarten! This is the big bad world, full of mean people, where nasty things happen! In the end it’s a one on one fight and when the camera shoots wide for the final attack on Hepburn cinema audiences screamed louder than they’d done since Psycho: theatre owners were warned to turn down their lights to make it an immersive experience. It’s a brilliant shock, a literal jump scare, excellently staged. Everything in the suspenseful narrative leading up to that situation is about how Susy compensates for her devastating sight loss – that’s a classic dramatic writing tool, utilising the protagonist’s apparent weakness and turning it to their advantage. There’s a terrific performance by child actor Herrod as the ungainly little girl whose behaviour is entirely unpredictable but who ultimately proves her worth as an ally, providing Susy with the eyesight she no longer has. This is all about how appearances can be deceptive. Everything planted is paid off in spades. Hepburn may not be outfitted in her preferred designer but she is gifted another Henry Mancini score (using two pianos, a quarter tone apart with eerie echoing phrases) and theme song to accompany this wholly impressive heroine, stripped back to her essence, deprived of one of her senses, cornered behind a refrigerator door by a drug-ridden madman, fighting for her life. It’s a totally committed physical performance, among Hepburn’s very best. Despite receiving an Academy Award nomination, her fifth, she wouldn’t make another film for eight years, divorcing Ferrer, marrying a Roman psychiatrist and having another child, before the world of cinema finally lured her back to Robin and Marian. She would reunite a few years following that with director Young for Bloodline, a disappointing potboiler. How would you like to something difficult and incredibly dangerous?
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