I love this time of year because TCM does 31 days of Oscar leading up to the Academy Awards. That means there’s almost always a good movie on. On Saturday night they played three great movies in a row. The evening ended with Three Days of the Condor. The middle film was The Apartment, and the whole thing started with Wait Until Dark, which is the film I’m going to focus on now.
The film’s premise has three small-time thugs, two of whom were played by Richard Crenna (Mike Tillman) and Alan Arkin (Roat), in the apartment of a blind woman played by Audrey Hepburn (Susy Hendrix), and looking for a doll that accidentally came into her posession that is containing bags of heroin. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know where it is, and the thugs come up with an elaborate plan to find it. Part of that plan has Mike pretending to be an old Marine buddy of her husband’s, who is away on business. The other two pretend to be various police detectives and relatives of the original owner of the doll. Mike sets himself up as the only one she can trust.
At various points in the charade, they’ve been calling her apartment from a phone booth outside. Susy has been taking various clues from her accute hearing, and starts to suspect that something is up, although she still trusts Mike. Gloria, a young girl who lives upstairs from Susy becomes suspicious as well when Susy tells her that Mike told her there was a cop car outside when there really isn’t one, but there’s only a white van by the phone booth. Susy instructs Gloria to watch the phone booth from her apartment. If anyone uses it, she is to call Susy from her apartment, let the phone ring twice, and then hang up. When one of the thugs comes to the apartment masquerading as a detective she comes up with a reason for him to call the station house. He calls the phone booth outside, where Mike answers it. They have a brief conversation before hanging up. A moment later, Susy’s phone rings twice. The thug leaves, but says he’ll be back.
Here’s where we get to the scene I want to discuss. Mike has left Susy the phone number to the phone booth, telling her that’s the way he can get in touch with her. Susy has discovered that Gloria had “borrowed” the missing doll and calls Mike to tell her she has it. He speaks to her from the phone booth and tells her he’ll be right over. Back in the apartment, Susy hangs up the phone and a moment later the phone rings twice and then stops. This signals to her that Mike is one of the thugs, and not only can she no longer trust him, but she’s just invited him back to her apartment.
What makes this scene such an effective one is that they presented the most important information that the main character could recieve without using a word of dialogue. They showed Susy discovering that Mike is a bad guy completely with action and acting and didn’t need to say a word. That’s the power of filmmaking and the power of screenwriting. Another effective screenwriting tool they used was planting and payoff. They planted that two rings means someone is calling from the phone booth, and they paid it off in an effective way because it was unexpected to the main character, who now knows just as much as the audience. What makes it effective is that she figured it out on her own. She didn’t need to be told through dialogue. Plus by figuring it out on her own, she garners much more sympathy from the audience, who symapthize for her being betrayed and will root harder for her to win in the end.
As a screenwriter, these are tools you need to use for a couple of reasons. First, they help you to tell a much more compelling and engaging story. Second, they make your writing look professional and polished. Third, they increase the level of drama in your script, and thus make it more attractive to studio executives and agencies.
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