SEE NO EVIL. Columbia Pictures, UK/US, 1971. British title: Blind Terror. Mia Farrow, Dorothy Alison, Robin Bailey, Diane Grayson, Brian Rawlinson, Norman Eshley, Paul Nicholas. Screenplay: Brian Clemens. Director: Richard Fleischer.

   Mia Farrow had already made Rosemary’s Baby (three years before) when she appeared in this movie, and even if she was 26 at the time, she could easily have passed for 16. Young, boyishly slim, ethereally beautiful, she might still have possessed a limited range as an actress, but no one could have doubted she was a movie star.

   And she’s the center of focus throughout this movie, recently blinded and forced to move in with her uncle, aunt and female cousin in their isolated English country mansion, she turns in a near tour de force of terror when a crazed killer leaves her unknowingly in a house full of blood and dead bodies.

   The emphasis is not on the killing, thankfully, but on her character’s reaction – I’ll take that back. It is the audience that is kept on the edge of their seats waiting for her to discover what they all know full well. Waiting and waiting, and then!

   Adjusting to becoming blind has to be one of the toughest tasks someone has to take on, and to be forced to undergo what Sarah does in her several mad dashes for escape, it is almost too much too bear. The killer is seen only from the waist down, in a series of low level shots not dissimilar to many seen in the definitive British TV spy series The Avengers, with which screenwriter Brian Clemens was long affiliated.

   Only the ending of See No Evil lets the viewer down, or at least this one, as Sarah is unaccountably left alone one last time, resulting in a fairly hair-raising one last encounter with the killer. All warning shouts to her boy friend, who’s just rescued her, go unheard. What a dummy!

[UPDATE] 10-19-09. Another movie with a similar theme is, of course, Wait Until Dark, 1967, with Audrey Hepburn as a young blind woman trapped in an apartment with a gang of hoodlums. I’ve been hoping someone else would mention it, as I haven’t seen it since it first came out, and I don’t remember any of the details — other than being scared to death for the heroine, who couldn’t see any of the dangers around her — but the audience could!