Film Pairing – Mystery Writers Writing About Mystery Writers

There are two Sleuths, one with Lawrence Olivier as a sophisticated and revered best-selling thriller writer and Michael Caine as…as…well we don’t quite know as the games begin.  Hair stylist.  In the second Sleuth, it is Michael Caine who is the older and well-practiced game player. To keep things complicated (we’ll sort them out), Caine again plays a once-revered writer – this time a playwright in Deathtrap. I’m partial to movies portraying writers because writers tend to view themselves as sophisticated elegant, witty, and wise. Of course we are.

These are three films that seem, two intentionally, to be from the same seed:  Sleuth1972, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz and written by Anthony Shaffer; Deathtrap 1982, written by Ira Levin and directed by Sidney Lumet; and Sleuth 2007 directed by Kenneth Branagh and written by Harold Pinter. Unfortunately Olivier’ 1972 version isn’t available, so I’ll simply take the overwhelming number of positive reviews and its ample number of Academy Awards as a recommendation.  Unfortunately, the 1972 version is for another night.  For tonight there’s just the two:

Reeve & Caine In Deathtrap

Deathtrap (1982) — A long-running Broadway play, Deathtrap is an enjoyable way to spend an evening. It’s talky, of course and small, perfect for a TV screen. In addition to Michael Caine, we are reminded of Christopher Reeve’s good looks and acting skills.  Also, his daring.  One of the first on-screen male-to-male kisses (between Caine and Reeve] was the scandal of the times and purportedly cost the studio  $10 million in lost revenue. This is almost a “how-to” create a mystery plot with twists, surprises, misdirection and reverses, while also making fun of mystery conventions in general. At one point Reeve’s character claims to be writing a more “important’ novel than the thriller, which he claims is all plot with two-dimensional characters.

Sleuth (2007) — At one point in the more conventional Deathtrap, we see a deceitfully worshipful Christopher Reeve enter the aging playwright’s rustic cabin.  He says, “Wow, it’s beautiful. Michael Caine, the playwright, is obviously bored. He says he would prefer something more high-tech. In Sleuth we find another aging writer, this time Caine as a worldly mystery novelist, in his very high tech home about to engage in another game, this time with what first appears to be an innocent Jude Law.

Law & Caine In Sleuth

Much like the fencing match between Reeve and Caine, here we have a more abstract fencing match between Law and Caine.  And while Caine has no problem filling the frame in any movie he makes, Law chews the scenery in this one.   He does a masterful if not conspicuous job of changing character, from tough, boorishly masculine to flirtatiously bitchy. Law goes for broke and one can’t not watch him.  There are really only three characters here.  Caine, Law and the house, all of them showing off, keeping us riveted to a mystery that isn’t, a crime that never happens.  That, in itself, is fascinating.

In sleuth Caine drinks lots of Vodka and Law lots of Scotch, though a highly disturbed Law eventually guzzles Caine’s Vodka. Do what you will in the privacy of your own home.  As I’ve mentioned before a glass of ice with lemon and tonic can create a sense of behaving badly without behaving badly.

Book Notes — The Servant, On Paper And On The Screen

The Maughams knew something about servants.  Certainly, Somerset’s nephew 2nd Viscount “Robin” Maugham must have.  He travelled in all the “right” circles, including those of his more famous uncle.

The Book: First American Edition

While he wrote several novels— four of which were translated to film — one of them gained particular acclaim as both a novella (really a short story bound as a hard back) and as a film, adapted by Harold Pinter, featuring Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles and James Fox. The Servant was published in 1958 and the film released in 1963.

Many consider the story an indictment of the British class system — and it is.  For me, it is both macro and micro views of power and domination.  Even though no one dies and there is no real crime in a legal sense, killing someone else’s soul might be a pretty horrendous act of cruelty, just as keeping servants in their place is an act of social injustice and abuse.  Thus, a symbolic victory by a servant who turns the tables on his master might have us rooting for how deftly the tables have been turned.  A small step for humankind.

The movie

But this seeming fluff of a story has a bit more bite than one might expect.  Going back to the power and domination theme, which befits a plot about a rebellion against an institutionalized class or caste system, the story nevertheless remains powerful without the social context.  It can be simply personal.  In the course of any relationship, for example, the person who seems to be the one running the show may not be.  Or, over time, through premeditation or natural selection, the weaker one in the beginning may preside in the end. (Certainly, there might be some nasty business in the interim.) I think this is the question the story asks.  Who deserves our sympathy?  The poor human who, through accident of birth, is given the short end of the socio-economic stick? Or the easily conned human, who while consciously meaning no harm, seems blissfully unaware that his upstairs status as a human being was also a result of a sperm lottery and unearned in any sense of the word? If he is also unaware that he and others like him have been exploiting a large chunk of the population upstairs and downstairs and all around the colonies, does that mean he deserves to be singled out and destroyed? Does the punishment fit the crime if criminal doesn’t know what crime he has committed?

Robin Maugham, The Nephew

I think The Servant makes the moral to be drawn, if you choose to draw one, a much more complex calculation. 

Robin Maugham was the author of more than 30 books, many of them crime fiction.  He was among the first of the popular writers to include gay themes and characters, which may have contributed to his early literary decline, whereas his far more successful, closeted gay uncle chose to avoid the subject altogether.

Film Pairing — The Dark Side Of Michael Caine Times 2

What do you do when people get in the way of your happiness and your ambition?  You kill them, of course.  Graham Marshall (Michael Caine) discovers this easy solution by accident when an angry, physically intimidating homeless man in a subway demands respect. Perhaps this hits too close.  Respect was what he wasn’t getting at home or at work.  The vagrant, an obvious failure in Marshall’s eyes, won’t go away.  A train and a little shove, not intended to kill — though it did — and poof, problem solved.  Now, on to other problems, larger, more irritating problems at home and at work.

In Shock to the System, based on the novel by Simon Brett, Caine plays an understated Don Draper, a man trying to advance in an advertising firm full of duplicitous, ass kissing executives.  The first death seems to light the way to the a dormant gene in Mr. Marshall’s constitution. He didn’t know he, who seemed to have a relatively mild, plodding personality, actually possessed the mind of a cold-blooded manipulator. He not only discovered this hidden talent, but now delighted in exercising it.  The cast — Elizabeth McGovern, Swoosie Kurtz and Will Patton — is solid, and the small, smart story is told well.  Is it possible to eliminate so many obstacles and not get caught?  We shall see.

Michael Caine makes so many films, he has to make some of them twice.   Sleuth is based on Anthony Shaffer’s award winning play. In the 1972 film, Caine played the younger of two characters in what turns out to be a deadly pissing match.  Lawrence Olivier played the older man, attempting to recover from the humiliation he felt at the theft his wife’s heart.  In 2007, the film was remade and updated, this time with Caine as the aging crime writer and Jude Law as the young actor or hairdresser (we’re not quite sure), who proves to be surprisingly adept at countering the sophisticated writer’s capricious, seemingly deadly moves.

What we have here is a stylish, mannered and fascinating two-person play in a stunning high-tech home, the third star of the film.  Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay and Kenneth Branagh directed.  Watching a cerebral and cunning Caine and a clever and outrageous Law going at each other is as good as it gets, a genuine championship bout. 

A Shock to the System is a fine undercard to Sleuth, which is clearly the main event.

Scotch would work as an accompaniment to the evening.  Martinis are probably too American for either film.  This is a British battle. By the way, both films, especially the claustrophobic Sleuth, work well on home screens.