Word: shaffer
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Directed by JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ Screenplay by ANTHONY SHAFFER...
...cannily manipulates them. That golden age, as a line in the script defines it, was "when every Cabinet Minister had a thriller by his bedside, and all the detectives were titled." To fully enjoy Sleuth, it is necessary to have an indulgent affection for this minor literary tradition. Shaffer is shrewd with a plot turn and smooth with breezy characterization. But he asks us, as did Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie or any other reigning monarch of the golden age, to accept too much and think too little...
...Michael Caine), a London hairdresser whose parents were Italian and-worse yet-Jewish, is the lover of Wyke's estranged wife. He comes by Wyke's stately home one afternoon to discuss a divorce. Wyke instead presses him into an intricate plot to defraud an insurance company. Shaffer would have us believe that one man. wanting another's wife, could easily be persuaded to dress up in a clown's outfit and stumble about, under the husband's wry supervision, trying to blow up a safe and remove the jewelry it contains...
...situation is absurd, of course, and not made any less so because Shaffer knows it and to some extent plays on it. Surprise and considerable theatrical skill are what Sleuth offers; yet its surprises, harking back again to the golden age, are of a singularly artificial and engineered kind. Shaffer is a better writer by yards than, say, Christie; yet Sleuth is finally undone by the same problems as beset those musty standards, Ten Little Indians or The Mousetrap. Such works tease and divert; yet there is always a feeling of having been a little cheated after the curtain falls...
...Chandler suggested that the central problem of the formal detective novel is that authors skilled at thinking out riddles are not very concerned with the niceties of style and characterization; by contrast, a better writer "won't be bothered with the coolie labor of breaking down unbreakable alibis." Shaffer tries to escape this dilemma by concentrating first on the personal, then the class bitterness between Wyke and Tindle, but the intricacies of his plot hem him in; the bitterness, instead of a motive, seems like an excuse. Characters remain incidental to the contortions of plot...