Word: sleuthing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Sleuth. The most overrated film thus far this year. Joseph L. Manckiewicz directs with the tired hands of an old whore, and the screenplay itself is not really that clever-an indictment of upper-class gamesmanship which considers itself righteous by having hairdresser Michael Caine expose detective story writer Laurence Olivier as a fake Labored...
COLONIAL THEATER. Sleuth at 7:30, mats, Thurs...
...REAL INSPECTOR HOUND by Tom Stoppard. A spoof of mystery thrillers and drama critics that is cleverer than Sleuth...
...known as the golden age of detective fiction at the same time that it 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...
...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...