Word: wyke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SLEUTH'S MOST STRIKING features, as anyone who's seen the film or the original play will tell you, are the surprising deceptions which reveal themselves every half-hour or so. Andrew Wyke, an English mystery writer (Sir Laurence Olivier), is at his Gothic estate when his wife's lover, a hairdresser named Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), arrives. Wyke proposes a shrewd plot: he will help Tindle "steal" the Wyke jewels, in order to defraud the insurance company. But that, we find, is not quite Wyke's real goal. And, a still later clever-and-bold twist tells us what...
...more people know its secrets. But the best points of the film are not the disclosures of its tricks--which may or may not deceive you--but the perceptively witty caricatures of the writer and of Inspector Doppler, the detective who makes a late night investigation at Wyke's estate...
...Andrew Wyke is an aging member of the gentry who leads a life of informal ease. Wearing an ascot and casual jacket, button-cuffed shirt and white socks, he dictates his latest novel in the garden, gleefully acting out the roles as he speaks into the microphone. The same self-conscious play-acting carries over into his dialogues with Tindle and Doppler, where Olivier handles it with lighthearted style. Where the script calls for Wyke to do impressions (such as Charlie Chan, a Bronx hoodlum, or the typical detective), Olivier presents them perfectly--as the exuberant expressions of an eccentric...
...Wyke is a vestigial man, a remnant of the Golden Age of detective fiction that, for all practical purposes, came to an end in the early 1930s. His was the age of aristocratic crime and criminal butlers, an age that shrugged off the brutal questions of murder and the criminal mind, concentrating instead on ratiocination, the logical elucidation of clues, and rules about playing fair with the reader. Schaffer sets out to murder and bury that genre--as if Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's cynically brutal crime stories had not already done so--by revealing Wyke's vindictive...
...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...