By JASON COMERFORD

Frederick Knott’s stage thriller Wait Until Dark has always benefited from sheer star power. The original Broadway production, directed by Arthur Penn, featured Lee Remick, Robert Duvall and Mitchell Ryan, with Honor Blackman assuming the lead role for a successful West End run. A 1998 revival, however, was less successful and closed after less than 100 performances, despite a cast including Marisa Tomei, Stephen Lang and, making his stage debut, Quentin Tarantino.

Despite its stage pedigree, Knott’s story of a blind woman menaced by a trio of criminals is perhaps best known today as the movie where Audrey Hepburn nearly gets her throat slashed open. Hitting theatres a mere 19 months after the play’s stage premiere, Terence Young’s 1967 film adaptation cast Hepburn in the starring role of Suzy Hendrix, a blind housewife in a Greenwich Village apartment who goes up against thug Harry Roat (played with evil relish by Alan Arkin) and his partners (Richard Crenna and Jack Weston), who are in search of a stash of heroin hidden inside a doll.

For the score, Young turned to Henry Mancini, whose lilting pop-style scores for films like Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Charade had contributed greatly to Hepburn’s meteoric rise to stardom; Hepburn personally requested that Mancini write the score to Two for the Road. Despite his fame and success as a pop jazz musician and songwriter, Mancini knew musical genres of all types inside and out, having cut his teeth as a member of the Universal Studios music department, assisting on over 100 films throughout the 1950s. And he was no stranger to musical thrills, having contributed to a number of sci-fi and horror favorites like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, This Island Earth, It Came From Outer Space, and The Creature Walks Among Us; he would later go on to contribute vibrant scores for genre entries like The Night Visitor, Nightwing and Lifeforce.

For Wait Until Dark, Mancini demonstrated his professional mastery by building the score around a particularly striking device: twin Baldwin pianos playing the same chord, but with one of the pianos tuned a quarter-tone flat, the difference in pitch giving the chords an distinctive, yet highly unsettling feel. Also employing a wide array of unusual instrumentation, including Novachord synthesizer, electric harpsichord, electric guitar, and a Japanese free-reed mouth organ called the sho, as well as a music-box-styled melody for the doll itself, Mancini’s unorthodox and smashingly effective score is a key element in the film’s screw-tightening terror.

One of the score’s most ferocious highlights is “Bulbus Terror,” a frenzied piece that employs piano, strings, Novachord, and sho to underscore Suzy’s discovery that she’s trapped in her apartment, with three saxophones and a piccolo snare drum generating tremendous energy as she commits to protecting herself – and to preparing her apartment for a final bloody battle. The opening salvo in one of cinema’s most memorably intense finales, “Bulbus Terror” exemplifies Mancini’s skill at full-powered orchestral fireworks, and still retains a freshness and energy that puts most contemporary thriller scoring to shame. Wait Until Dark went completely unreleased for 40 years, save for a pair of themes rerecorded for a 45rpm single, until Film Score Monthly’s comprehensive 2007 release – a true masterpiece of the genre finally given the loving treatment it so richly deserves.