BEFORE: Alan Arkin carries over from "Slums of Beverly Hills", which is a very sneaky move on my part. I can use actors with long careers to switch between modern films and classic ones - I've got plans to use Alan Arkin as a link later on in the year also, which should get me out of another tight spot. I had a plan just to use this film as a link without watching it, and then TCM did me the favor of running it as part of their "31 Days of Oscar" programming, since I think the title song got a nomination. Anyway, it was really nice of that channel to run this film 3 days ago so I could watch it now.
THE PLOT: A recently blinded woman is terrorized by a trio of thugs while they search for a heroin stuffed doll they believe is in her apartment.
AFTER: This is one of those films that audiences today might not understand, because we've had so many advances in technology since its release in 1967. Me, I wasn't released until 1968, but I still remember a lot about technology in the Dark Ages, so I'll give it a go.
I should say that I know almost nothing about the technology employed by blind people today, or even back then, except for braille. I'm sure there have been advances, though - I think I saw something the other day about tech that helps blind people "watch" movies. (I can say pretty much anything about blind people, because I figure they aren't reading my blog and they don't really care about movies - so that's a segment of the populace I don't have to worry about offending...)
But for you kids out there, that heavy-looking black thing on the table with the wire coming out of it is a telephone. A non-cellular phone, and it didn't play games or show you a map or tell you who's singing that catchy song playing in the coffee shop. In those days you picked up the receiver, spoke to an operator, and you asked to be connected, or if you knew the number, you had to push this heavy dial around with your finger, assuming your fingers were strong enough. If your friend's number had a lot of 8's and 9's in it, you had to allow more time for the dial to go around, and if your finger slipped you had to hang up, wait like three minutes for the dial-tone and try again.
Oh, right - dial tone. That was a sound that you used to hear when you picked up the phone, that let you know it was OK to make a call. If you didn't hear that, there was something wrong with the phone. If you tried to move the phone to another desk, or reached too far for something when talking on the phone, you might pull the wire out from the wall, then you were basically screwed and had to wait two weeks for the phone company to send a repairman.
Also, pay phones. There used to be these little booths on street corners, where you could go inside the little booth (or not, you had to reach in if you were a big fat guy) and you could put a quarter in a slot and make a phone call. Weird, I know - but people just didn't have phones in their pockets back then.
They apparently didn't even have "911" service back then. You had to call the operator with the "0" part of the dial, but who put the zero at the farthest part of the dial? If your house was on fire, it could
burn down in the time it took the dial to go all the way around... You were probably better off if you memorized the number of your local fire + police stations, or had them written down nearby. But you had to look those up in a phone book, you couldn't just Google them.
Oh, right - phone book. This was a big book that had everyone's phone number in it, alphabetically by last name. Unless someone had moved into town or left town in the last two years, in which case it was useless. You won't see a phone book in this film, because the main character is blind, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. It used to be one big book, with residences in one section and then businesses in the next, but if you lived in a big city then you needed one book, white pages, for people, and another book, yellow pages, for businesses. I grew up in suburban Boston, and because my father was a deacon in the Catholic church, he had to be able to reach other deacons around the state, so we had to get the phone books for South Suburban Boston, West Suburban Boston, North of Boston, and Boston itself. In your whole life, you're never going to use each book more than 4 or 5 times to look somebody up, but because there was literally NO OTHER WAY, you had to have the phone number of every single person in your metropolitan region taking up space on your shelf.
(BTW, books were collections of physical paper with writing on it. Not sure how far back I need to go here...)
What else in this film might be confusing to young viewers. Drugs? Drugs were illegal substances that were sold on street corners. People used to buy them to feel pleasure or numbness, because nobody had yet invented video games or Enya music. They were sold by people called "dealers", but I think New York got rid of them all some time during the Giuliani administration, they were all forced to work at places like the Disney Store or the m&m store in Times Square.
Ah, photography. The main character's husband here is a photographer, and again, this was before we had digital technology, so he had a studio and a darkroom. A darkroom was a place where you had to go to take the film out of your camera, because any light at all would ruin it, and you had to put the film cartridge, a spool and a container into a big canvas bag, and by touch you had to thread the exposed film on to a spool, making sure it didn't touch itself at any point, and put the spool into the container. Then you could take the container and your hands out of the canvas bag, put dangerous chemicals into the container that would expose the film, and this would turn them into negatives. When they dried, you could take the negatives and put them on a device in the darkroom that would shine light through them and the light would hit a piece of photographic paper, then you took the paper and put into a tray of more toxic chemicals to activate the image, another tray of chemicals to stop the exposure, and then a tray of water to wash off all the chemicals, then hang them to dry. After a couple hours work, you would have a photo that probably needed to be made again because you got your big fingerprint in the middle of it.
I think that pretty much covers it - people still shop for groceries and defrost their refrigerators, right? No? Damn it all. Anyway, all kidding aside, this is a pretty tight thriller, with bad villains and an innocent victim and a situation that will keep you on your toes. In tone, it's probably somewhere between "Home Alone" and "Panic Room", if that makes any sense.
Also starring Audrey Hepburn (last seen in "Breakfast at Tiffany's"), Richard Crenna (last seen in "Sabrina"), Jack Weston (last seen in "Cactus Flower"), Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Samantha Jones, Julie Herrod.
RATING: 6 out of 10 light bulbs
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