See no evil hear no evil cast6/13/2023 ![]() ![]() She's backed by a solid British supporting cast, which includes early film roles for Michael Elphick and Paul Nicholas, plus a number of familiar faces that will have you screwing up your face in an effort to recall their names and just what it was that you last saw them in. Playing blind is always a tricky thing to get right for a sighted actor, but Mia Farrow does an admirable job here, and having delivered a masterclass in vulnerability and fear in Rosemary's Baby, she does likewise here with such conviction that there were times that I almost wanted to climb into the screen and give her a reassuring hug. Fleischer absolutely milks all this for tension, then seemingly offers Sarah an avenue of escape (albeit from a situation that she doesn't realise she's in) and then deposit her right back into it again and crank up the tension further to the level of a direct threat on her life. Most nerve-wracking of all is the broken glass that has been left scattered over the kitchen floor that the shoeless Sarah repeatedly just misses but that you just know will catch her out at the very worst moment. One particular near-discovery involving a bathtub actually prompted me to let out a yelp, whilst another tells you everything you need to know through slow zooms onto an abandoned mower and an empty pair of Wellington boots. And while in Young's film, Susy is terrorised for a specific reason, the killer in See No Evil selects his target at random after his well-protected feet are splashed with mud by their car as it passes on its way to pick up Sarah from the station.įleischer elects not to show the murders, but instead exposes their aftermath in a series of genuinely chilling reveals, as Sarah moves around what she believes is an empty house and passes within a few inches of her slaughtered relatives. While Wait Until Dark is driven forward by a plot to recover a doll containing smuggled heroin, See No Evil initially takes a more low-key and character-based approach, as we are introduced to Sarah, her family and her love interest and then given some time to get to know them. The basics of the central concept aside, these are very different films and deserved to be seen not as rivals but as companion pieces. ![]() And while there's no question that Wait Until Dark was a belting thriller, I see no reason why a film as strong in execution as See No Evil should be cast in its shadow. It was also first past the post with the concept of a blind girl caught up in a fight for her life against a single unhinged and murderous male, and there is a critical tendency to credit ownership of an inventive idea to the first film to use it and by association suggest that any recycling of the concept must somehow be inferior by default. There are certainly obvious similarities in the setup, and Wait Until Dark was also a sizeable critical and box-office hit. It's perhaps no surprise that Richard Fleischer's 1971 See No Evil – which was released in the UK as Blind Terror (more on that below) – sometimes finds itself negatively compared to Terence Young's 1967 Wait Until Dark, in which a blind woman named Susy (played by Audrey Hepburn) finds herself terrorised in her home by sadistic sociopath Harry Roat (Alan Arkin). When Sarah returns, she is unaware that her aunt, her uncle and her cousin Sandy have all been murdered. While they are out, the house is visited by an unidentified man who has been stalking the family. ![]() ![]() She's visited there by her boyfriend Steve (Norman Eshley), who risks re-awakening past trauma by getting her back onto a horse and taking her riding, which she enjoys. Having lost her sight in a horse riding accident, young Sarah (Mia Farrow) goes to stay with her aunt and uncle (Dorothy Alison and Robin Bailey) at their sizeable estate in the restful quiet of the English countryside. Slarek nervously chews on his fingernails. Mia Farrow stars as a blind young woman whose family becomes the target of a psychopathic killer in SEE NO EVIL, Richard Fleischer's lean and stylish 1971 thriller, which lands a typically excellent dual format release from Indicator. ![]()
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