Parlor Trick

By JAY COCKS

SLEUTH

Directed by JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ Screenplay by ANTHONY SHAFFER

This is a fastidious, acrobatically cunning and invigoratingly well-acted thriller. It gently parodies the puzzles of what has come to be 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 too little.

Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier) is a wealthy member of the English gentry. He is also the author of a dozen novels about the aristocratic investigator St. John Lord Merridew and an obsessive games player whose home looks like a cross between Pollock's Toy Museum and a penny arcade. Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), a London hairdresser whose parents were Italian and--worse yet--Jewish, is the lover of Wyke's estranged wife. He comes by Wyke's stately home one afternoon to discuss a divorce. Wyke instead presses him into an intricate plot to defraud an insurance company. Shaffer would have us believe that one man. wanting another's wife, could easily be persuaded to dress up in a clown's outfit and stumble about, under the husband's wry supervision, trying to blow up a safe and remove the jewelry it contains.

The 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 or the last page is turned. Their stubborn remoteness from reality, which is part of their charm, is also their undoing.

In his justly famed essay, The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler suggested that the central problem of the formal detective novel is that authors skilled at thinking out 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.

In this film adaptation, the proscenium arches of the London and New York stage versions seem to be looming just out of camera range. Mankiewicz is a film maker who has always taken a bemused interest in the folk ways of the theater. He wrote and directed All About Eve, a film to which he pays sly homage here, and he has chosen to accentuate the script's staginess instead of trying to break out of it.

The movie begins with shots of various set designs and ends with a curtain descending briskly on a miniature stage.

Even his deliberate flaunting does not solve the problem. It is like a crippled man bedecking his wheelchair with flowers in hopes that no one will notice his paralysis.

Of late, Olivier's movie activity has been confined to playing a variety of cameos in top-heavy histories like Nicholas and Alexandra. It is good to see him again in a role of size, if not of substance, and he makes wonderful sport of it. His face is a study in split-second metamorphoses. He does so much with it so fast that sometimes, in a closeup, he gives the impression of a multiple exposure. Caine seems not in the least daunted by acting with a legend incarnate. To say that he matches Olivier in every way is to pay him the highest of compliments.

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