Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin tangle in this one-room thriller, pitting Arkin's slimy underworld fixer (and his two slightly-less-unseemly cohorts) against Hepburn's lone feeble, blind housewife in a test of wills. Arkin's gang doesn't want to make a scene if they don't have to - they're just after the dope-stuffed doll that fell into her possession - but patience wears thin as their con act falters and she continues dodging questions.
It's a promising setup, if a little dull in practice, but neither of the against-type primary roles really click. Hepburn is sweet but stiff in her central role, out-of-place in an unfamiliar genre, while Arkin's twisted erudite hipster is more of a hand-wringing silver age comic book villain than the dark, gritty, street-level threat he's obviously meant to be. A crafty final showdown between the pair levels the playing field, smartly ratcheting tension in a string of almost pitch-black struggles over a knife, a fridge door and a can of gasoline. That scene was the subject of much promotion during the film's original run, aided by a gimmick that had theater-owners extinguish all lighting (even the exit signs?) to enhance the effect. The white-knuckled climax works well enough, and I'm sure the atmospheric bonus would've been a neat wrinkle, but it's insufficient compensation for the half-cooked hour of water-treading that precedes it.
Review by drqshadowBlockedParent2020-11-27T13:02:22Z
Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin tangle in this one-room thriller, pitting Arkin's slimy underworld fixer (and his two slightly-less-unseemly cohorts) against Hepburn's lone feeble, blind housewife in a test of wills. Arkin's gang doesn't want to make a scene if they don't have to - they're just after the dope-stuffed doll that fell into her possession - but patience wears thin as their con act falters and she continues dodging questions.
It's a promising setup, if a little dull in practice, but neither of the against-type primary roles really click. Hepburn is sweet but stiff in her central role, out-of-place in an unfamiliar genre, while Arkin's twisted erudite hipster is more of a hand-wringing silver age comic book villain than the dark, gritty, street-level threat he's obviously meant to be. A crafty final showdown between the pair levels the playing field, smartly ratcheting tension in a string of almost pitch-black struggles over a knife, a fridge door and a can of gasoline. That scene was the subject of much promotion during the film's original run, aided by a gimmick that had theater-owners extinguish all lighting (even the exit signs?) to enhance the effect. The white-knuckled climax works well enough, and I'm sure the atmospheric bonus would've been a neat wrinkle, but it's insufficient compensation for the half-cooked hour of water-treading that precedes it.