Word: wyke
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...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...
SCHAFFER'S CRITICISM of Wyke, and, by inference, of the Golden Age, misses its mark. Perhaps making a mystery writer a real-life criminal is too easy on a irony. For the most part, the analysis stays on a personal level, where it is compounded by the issues of cuckoldry and class hatred. Many of Wyke's speeches represent Schaffer's view of aristocratic thought in general, while the real interest of the film lies in Wyke's relationship to the sort of books he writes. The details, like Wyke's all-white jigsaw puzzle or his fondness...
...altogether certain and the players begin to act almost like characters from the great detective stories. Inspector Doppler's dress and speech mark him, not as a simple stereotype, but as a real detective who is cautiously aware of past mystery movies and books. The interplay between Doppler and Wyke features fine acting and psychological suspense that's effective even if you've already figured out the plot...