Wait Until Dark

Plots: 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. Susy was recently blinded and recently married. Susy’s husband, Sam, is asked to hold a doll for a woman he doesn’t know as they get off an airplane. The woman disappears. Later, she’s found dead by her former associates, Mike and Carlino, small-time hoods, in Susy’s basement apartment. (Both occupants of the apartment are then absent.) The doll woman’s newer partner in crime, Harry Rote, who murdered her for self-dealing, presses Mike and Carlino into a scheme to recover the doll, which contains a fortune in smuggled heroin. After disposing of the body, the thugs return while Susy is present to continue their search. They assume Susy’s blindness will enable them to search her apartment under her very nose for the doll. In Sam’s absence, Mike pretends to be an old friend of Sam’s, while the three together spin for Susy a story of a murder investigation of her husband from which only the finding of the missing doll can save him. Rote is a predator, and his stalking of Susy becomes ever more obvious as the blind woman’s predicament becomes ever more desperate. While trying to smuggle a cache of heroin hidden in a doll into the United States through JFK from a flight originating in Montreal, Lisa spots an adversary at JFK, so she hands off the doll to an unsuspecting man she just met, a New York photographer named Sam Hendrix, from who she plans on retrieving the doll later. However, Sam misplaces the doll once he gets home. That adversary, a sadistic criminal named Harry Roat, using an argument they can’t refuse, convinces two of Lisa’s just released from prison associates, Mike Talman and Carlino, to assist him in retrieving the doll from Sam’s Greenwich Village apartment, them without even knowing what’s inside, or without any of the three knowing that Hendrix has no idea where the doll is anymore. Roat, Talman and Carlino believe their task is all the more easy when they learn that Sam’s wife, Susy Hendrix, is blind. As Susy is still adjusting to her recent blindness, Sam does whatever he can to make her as self-sufficient as possible, which she often still resents. They concoct a seemingly innocuous plan to infiltrate Susy’s life while Sam is conveniently sent out of town on business. If the plan goes awry at any point, Susy would have no idea that her life would be in danger. What Roat, Talman and Carlino may be unaware of is that Susy does have eyes in the form of the Hendrix’s precocious adolescent neighbor, Gloria, who knows more about the missing doll than she initially lets on, and that Susy may have certain advantages in life due to her blindness.