The brief engagement proved to be the City Courthouse. There was a chap named Morrison who had been both brave and foolish enough to confront the public with his conscientious objection to being drafted. Such objection was not necessarily frowned upon by the authorities—apart from medical grounds, exemptions from conscription were available to married men, non-Australian nationals, aborigines, any person with provable religious objection except Christians who in turn were presumably exempted from the sixth commandment by the arch-bishop, anyone whose brother was drafted or in the military, anyone professionally trained or in such training—like doctors, lawyers and so forth, anyone playing an essential family support role and in addition, unofficially, anyone whose parents were rich enough to influence the appropriate authorities, and finally, temporary deferment to any fulltime students, into which category Bucky Buckland supposedly fell. On the face of it, it was therefore surprising that there was anyone left to go at all. Except socially useless dumb-bums like me.

Wait Until Dark was a nifty little one set thriller (from a successful play) in which Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman who unwittingly possesses a doll containing a drug shipment, and the three villains (Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, Jack Weston) take turns trying to exploit her blindness to deceive her, then try to force her, to hand it over. She evens up the final fight by removing all the light bulbs but forgets the one that comes on when the fridge door opens. The moment when the apparently dead Arkin leaps across the screen like a panther to grab her ankle was the biggest thrill in a movie since Psycho. One night I was passing a drive-in and noticed on the screen that the moment was at hand, so I parked and waited and was rewarded with an almighty scream from the audience. Life can be such a joy sometimes.
    The scene, of course, made it almost mandatory for villains and monsters in horror films to have one last gasp effort left in them, just when everyone thought they were dead and the movie was over and they could relax. Like all tedious clichés, only the first instance was amazing.