Product: SLEUTH - (Russian Import - PAL DVD) (1972)
Rating: 5.0
Come into my parlour(1972 version)
Saw this film so many years ago and was entranced by it then coming as it does from a remarkably well crafted stage play,by one of our best playwrights,Anthony Shaffer.What really draws you in is the battle of wits between the older,more erudite,class conscious gentleman Andrew Wyke(Olivier),whose games-playing hides his snobbery against those like Milo Tyndale(Michael Caine),from poorer back grounds,who betray their non-Englishness,and lack of ability to match Wyke in gamesmanship.Tyndale is perceived as a social-climbing, wop hairdresser,who steals other men's wives. Olivier plays a famous author of detective stories who plans to out wit his wife's lover by inviting him to his country house where he emulates his own fictional hero.He appeals to his vanity by roping him into a plausible scheme of a robbery from his house safe to enrich them both.He really wants to humiliate him.What really had me watching was the contrast in acting styles between Olivier and Caine.Olivier coming from a great tradition of stage acting, playing Henry V,Othello,Richard III,Hamlet and Lear,transferring them to film and then going on to do parts in cinema like Heathcliffe,act in Marathon Man as a Nazi or a detective in Bunny Lake is Missing.Caine,the young new talent in British cinema with Zulu,Alfie,Harry Palmer ,The Italian Job and Get Carter. His acting was hard-boiled,down-to-earth,suave,well tailored to an inarticulate,yet good-looking modernity.Caine's acting was basically playing himself,a form of non-acting.A contrast then between the verbose,athletic and animated Olivier,with all his capacity for nuance,subtlety,emotion,and Caine's taciturnity,playing shallow, aggressive,hedonists.Caine was put on his guard straight away,pitting his acting chops against the man most ennobled in his professionalism.The film lives up to this with Olivier playing with all the animus and bile of Richard III,condescending to Caine's apprentice learner,whose previous greatest lines-"You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"-do not prepare for him turning the tables on the Master,especially his Inspector Doppler.I loved the energetic use of the stage set,the moving puppets, the swirling toys,the laughing man who seems to make his victim laugh on the wrong side of their face.That these two hold one's attention for the best part of 2.5 hours is remarkable.The directing extraordinary by Mankeiwitz and the screenplay by Shaffer.These two actors were made to play opposite each other in a way never done before and never seen since.Brilliant fun in a stage house full of props,costumes,eccentric toys and stuffed animals,not forgetting the maze.An ingenious detective thriller combines suspense and surprise with a witty burlesque of the genre itself.