Word: sleuthings
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...true greatness was in the theater, but Olivier has rendered many memorable film performances: Hamlet, Henry, Richard, Othello, Astrov, Strindberg's Captain, and to a lesser, though often equally delightful extent, Heathcliff, Archie Rice in The Entertainer, Graham Weir in Term of Trial and Andrew Wyke in Sleuth. Perhaps, many hope, he will return to the stage someday, if not to undertake a more mature Lear (he did it in '46 at the Old Vic), then perhaps to portray Prospero. There are those of us who would swim the Atlantic for a chance to see that...
...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, dumping...
Deathtrap is not the ingenious successor to Sleuth 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...
...chilly, willful man, remarried anyway. Agatha spent the next years mostly out of England, traveling in remote parts of the Middle East until she found a kinder husband, the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. She began to create a series of lonely, high-strung heroines, and soon fashioned a sleuth, Jane Marple, whose method of detection is based on solid premises: appearances are misleading and to trust is to be deceived...
...Sleuth...