Word: truscott
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...McLeavy's coffin. Mrs. McLeavy is the recently departed mother of one of the boys. Mr. McLeavy (Milo O'Shea) has a lickerish eye on Fay the nurse (Lee Remick), whose charms are available at an ever accelerating price. Investigating them all is a detective called Truscott (Richard Attenborough), who fancies he is fooling everyone by disguising himself as a member of the water board. At the denouement, just deserts are enjoyed...
...parlor of her house, until her son Hal and his friend the undertaker Dennis, who have just stolen a pile of "loot," decide to hide her corpse in a cabinet and to bury in her coffin, with full Roman Catholic death rites, the money they want to hide. Truscott, a Scotland Yard sleuth on the trail of Fay, a nurse who has poisoned Mrs. McCleavey and killed seven successive husbands in one decade, appears on the scene, calls himself the Water Commissioner Inspector, and ferrets out clues about Mrs. McCleavey's death and the missing money...
...sort of ludicrous out-rage is repeated again and again. Sex and religion, which rank after death as targets of Orton's jesting, also reach a point of diminishing returns after the first machine-gun fire of jokes. Lines such as "God is a gentleman. He prefers blonds," or Truscott's "I wasn't expecting pharaohs" to Hal's cowering outcry "Mummy!" are slipshod lapses...
John Paul Russo as Truscott gave an amusing, intelligence performance, but I single out that character for special attention because Truscott stands for one of many loose ends which Orton failed to tie together in writing this play, and perhaps the most interesting one-his satirical, warped vision of bureaucratic authority. Truscott tyrannizes the old widower Mr. McCleavey in his own home by searching where and when he pleases, and threatening to cut off the water supply. When Anthony Mowbray, heavily made up as the old McCleavey, asks Truscott by what right he does all this, Russo lifts his eyes...
...just died. The duo plan to skedaddle with the loot while the funeral is going on. At the same time, the dead mother's cynically efficient nurse (Carole Shelley), a sevenfold murderess of previous husbands, is precipitously wooing the bereaved widower. Into this den of agitated vipers steps Truscott (George Rose) of Scotland Yard. Disguised as an employee of the water board in order to bypass certain laws that confine the limits of police activity, Truscott is the eternal flatfoot. He has an infallible gift for minute circumstantial deduction, such as the source of burn stains on a wedding...