Crime to a Bittersweet Tune

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 Wyke really wants is not what he really wants. And in that fashion the games go on.

Anthony Schaffer's Tony Award-winning play is currently Broadway's longest run. The film, with screenplay by Schaffer, has played in other cities for almost two months. So many people have seen Sleuth that a lot 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 who's not nearly so good at voices as he thinks he is.

Olivier's face beautifully mirrors the progress of the games the characters play. When he's ahead, his high spirits bubble. He moves, and even prepares his caviar, with the rhythm of his Cole Porter 78's. But after even slight reversals in the plot, his face turns slightly sour; give him greater trouble and he'll pout; and if you beat him, why then he's momentarily lost, his virility sapped, though his rolling tongue will still grope for words with which to snatch victory.

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 hypocrisy and then having Tindle attack Wyke's books as "the normal recreation of snobbish, outdated, life-hating, ignoble minds."

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 for his tiny Edgar Allan Poe award, are far more telling than all the derogatory epithets Schaffer can stuff into Wyke's mouth.

Though Sleuth admonishes that crime is not a game, its captivating appeal derives mainly from its middle scenes, where no facts are 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.

Director Joseph Mankiewicz has described his direction as that of "the oldest whole in the business," and the Hollywood professionalism he referred to in that way contributes to the film's successful adaptation. Sleuth is a group effort of the scenarist, director, and actors, where Mankiewicz's role was directing the performances and letting the play speak for itself. His direction of the filming, as always, is devoid of innovation but adequate for his task; he exploits slow zooms and cut-ins to create or relieve tension, and makes most shots as simple as possible. Unfortunately, a few simple mistakes mar the film: footage showing Caine moving a misplaced red raincoat was inadvertently included; pool balls are racked up in the middle of a game; and a camera crewman's shadow hangs ominously over a window.

There's moderate but bouncy rhythm in the cutting throughout much of the film, emphasized by appropriate and cleverly orchestrated themes by John Addison, that reaches a jaunty high when Caine, who is able throughout, is disguised in a clown costume and about to break into the house. Caine actually becomes a clown as he makes his way across the croquet field, dodging the wickets but falling nevertheless, and making subtler visual jokes with the sticky putty in his collections of burgler tools.

MANKIEWICZ FEARED audience boredom because so few characters are ever seen at one time, so he introduced lots of unusual props--mainly complicated automated toys from the Victoria Museum of Childhood. He thought they would be interesting in themselves, making another character and providing relief from the constant dialogue. He was wrong, as many critics have been quick to point out. But his idea is still effective, to my mind, not because it makes an extra person but because the living room filled with lively figures extends Wyke's character into the complex fantasy of his fiction. Like Wyke's books, the automata are by no means puerile, though both belong to the realm of extended childhood.

Sometimes Mankiewicz's emphasis on the figures is unnecessary, but the best shots in the film depend on it. A long track around the living room, accompanied by Porter's "You Do Something to Me" sums up the mood of Act Two, and these final scenes conclude with a chattering montage, as all the automata go berserk.