Word: sidney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SIDNEY BRUHL lives in the wilds of East Hampton with his dotty wife Myra and her brown Mercedes. She's very rich; he's written four Broadway flops. She screams when the telephone rings; he's snide, dry, urbane and British. She has a weak heart; he collects antique instruments of destruction. And they don't get along too well either. It all seems so obvious...
...minute. This is comedy-thriller and we're still in act one. Some master plotting is in order here--bizarre reversals, wacky characters, things going bump in the night. After all, Myra (Dyan Cannon) may be a bit too touchy/feely for her husband's effete tastes, but has-been Sidney (Michael Caine) would never murder her--he needs an ego-booster, not the missus's millions. Or does...
Enter, stage right, the young and oh-so-handsome Clifford Anderson (played by the young and oh-so-handsome Christopher Reeve), an aspiring playwright and adoring former student of Sidney's at Stonybrook. Clifford has written a play called Deathtrap, a sure-fire smash which turns his professor green with envy, and he brings it to the Hamptons for some polishing up. He also brings his outline and all his notes. No other copy of the play exists (the xerox is "on the fritz"); he lives alone; no one else has read his incipient masterpiece. Maces and daggers loom ominously...
...comparison. But with intricate plot twists (which unfortunately tend to fizzle toward the end), and some snappy dialogue, it makes a fair attempt at matching the wit and elegance of Shaffer's play. Tendorp, the psychic, adds a nice comic touch by dropping by to see Sidney at all the wrong times, and prophesying ominously about a dangerous playwright named "Smith-Collona." Cannon is suitably daffy as the gushing Myra, and Reeve is, well, a hunk. Caine, who played Reeve's younger man to Laurence Olivier in Sleuth, undoubtedly steals the show. Biting and demonic one moment, vulnerable and pitiful...
...fact, the constitution did pass quite strongly with 75 percent of the vote and a 58 percent turnout. It would be a shame if the decisiveness of that passage were obscured. Sidney Verba '53 Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education