Word: shaffer
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...trickiest suspense-thrillers in recent theatrical history also opens March 9 at Leverett House. Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth is almost impossible for a viewer to solve--even the playbill is misleading. We really can't say anything else. Sleuth runs March 9,10,11 and 16,17,18 in the Old Library; tickets available at Holyoke Center or at the door...
Scientists do not know whether to snicker or be outraged, and most have been hesitant to dignify the theory by formally investigating it. Last month a team of intrepid researchers at Johns Hopkins University ventured into the area. Writing in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Psychologist John Shaffer and Psychiatrist Chester Schmidt reported that despite biorhythm's "wistful appeal," the theory just doesn't work...
...value, the form was always limited. Having exhausted all possible realistic variations, it is not surprising that the thriller playwright has had to turn the form in on itself, self-consciousness being the last available twist. The character of Andrew Wyke, the bigoted, infantile, impotent detective novelist in Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, was the logical culmination of the mystery-writer's view of himself in a world where such structured escapism has become frustratingly antiquated. It was an opportunistic out for Shaffer, himself a writer of second-rate mysteries, but Sleuth was both high comedy and a fairly stylish thriller...
...that Levin obviously wanted to write, but a desperate imitation of it. The same sorts of turn-arounds preponderate, and the playwright-protagonist, Sidney Bruhl (John Wood), as unscrupled as Wyke when it comes to murder, speaks in similarly sardonic conceits. But Levin, although he tries hard, has neither Shaffer's command of language nor his ability to make each epigram peculiarly illustrative of some aspect of character; Levin uses witticisms to fill pauses. To be fair, the script contains many very funny lines--assorted theater jokes, ESP jokes (one of the characters is psychic), a few bitchy asides that...
...film sufficiently slick and commercial to avoid the stigma of a pseudo-Bergman exploration of the soul, yet without cheapening the gravity of the questions that arise from the struggle between Dysart and his young patient. Much of the credit for this achievement must of course go to Shaffer's extraordinary script. But such a nod to the playwright in no way lessens the triumph of the man behind the camera...