the leading man is my tpye

one of my absolute favorites!

A Disappointing Continuation

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

I watched this for the first time in the middle of the day, with the lights on, on my laptop. It still scared the spit out of me. That terror is only heightened when the lights go out and the screen gets bigger. Audrey Hepburn is my favorite actor of all time, and this is my favorite performance of hers.

I had great expectations from this movie, especially seeing the high rating and the actors' names. What I got instead proved to be an extremely naive "thriller/mystery" that left me with more questions than answers. For example, why wouldn't she just give them the damn doll?!! Or why send the little girl in the park to look for her husband so that he can come with the police instead of just sending her directly to the police station? Even the way the criminals tried to convince her to give up the doll is not at all convincing? What happened to good old physical methods that are so common in today's movies? And so on and so forth, I could just go on and on forever. Disappointed, that's what sums it.

A clever screenplay and a tight plot deliver a neat psychological thriller, with Audrey Hepburn portraying a blind woman who's the target of a vicious criminal intent on retrieving some heroin hidden in a doll her husband received in an unintended hand-off at the airport. Whew! It sounds complicated but it's really not once the story gets going. This one will keep you fascinated with it's subtle twists with the characters, resulting in a convincing climax as the handicapped woman wins out against her tormentors.One thing I thought the writers were going for though resulted in no follow through. At one point, crooked cop Talman (Richard Crenna) makes a slow, deliberate call to the phone booth outside Susy Hendrix's apartment, and the attentive viewer will figure she's counting the dial clicks to realize it's the same number he gives her for his police contact. That seemed a wasted moment for me, since Susy was so resourceful in every other respect. Another point, when Susy prepares for her showdown with Roat (Alan Arkin), she eliminates all the light sources in her apartment, but the ones she simply unscrews by hand would have burned her without protection, so that seemed like an unforced error in the story.So the picture is a half century old as I write this, and if you need to be convinced such a thing as inflation exists, how about Talman asking for two hundred fifty bucks up front for him and partner Carlino (Jack Weston) to fall in with Roat? What! - mere chickenfeed today for the enterprising criminal. And then, when neighbor Gloria shows up at the apartment with two full bags of groceries for five bucks, I knew we were still in the Twilight Zone era.For all that, the picture still delivers pretty well in the suspense department, and the coup de grace in the script occurred when Gloria made her two-ring telephone signal to Susy that second time, and she realized the outside phone booth connected Talman with Roat. Still, I had to wonder when it was all over if it was really worth it for Roat to kill three victims for those few bags of heroin he pulled out of the doll. I'm not up on my drug prices, but it didn't seem like there was that much there for him to get so intense about. Even so, Arkin was convincing in his role, all three of them if you count the impersonations, but then again, why go through all that for a blind lady?

I remember being show this movie on Halloween by my 6th grade teacher. we all dimmed the lights and all my other classmates were looking around at each other. We had NO idea what kind of movie we would be watching and we were all anticipated about getting to watch a movie in class.When the credits rolled I believe it was me and all my table mates that were quaking in fright after all that we had witnesses. However, I think I may be the only one who remembers it all vividly. Even to this day I'm still shocked that that movie was presented to us yet at the same time I was glad to see it. If it weren't for my 6th grade teacher I probably wouldn't have ever thought of seeing it.The acting in this movie is great and Audrey Hepburn does a wonderful job playing a blind woman. I bet that's a very hard role to play without screwing up at one point if you can see perfectly well.The shadows and the quiet yet eerie soundtrack will make you shudder at times. However, even if you're not into Thriller, Crime of Horror, your eyes will always be glued to the screen.