Deaths Put On By Cunning

"A thriller in two acts. One set, five characters."

(SPOILER WARNING: I will be discussing the plots of both Sleuth and Deathtrap, which may involve some spoilers. If you haven’t already seen them, I strongly recommend going in as blind as possible. You won’t regret it.)

Devious minds: Anthony Shaffer and Ira Levin

1969: Anthony Shaffer had given up a life as a practicing barrister to move into advertising¹, but his enthusiasm was on the wane. His twin brother Peter had already wowed the theatre world with his epic conquistador play The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) and the brilliantly gimmicky Black Comedy (1965)². Together, the brothers had written a handful of mystery novels under the pen name of Peter Anthony (one of which – Withered Murder – Anthony Shaffer had cheekily reviewed in The London Mystery, calling it ”the best detective story this century.”), but it wasn’t enough. Anthony Shaffer wanted to make his mark. He left his job – he believed a sabbatical was too much of a safety net - and promptly started work on a play about a husband, wife, mistress, and lover. But it was tough sledding. Shaffer didn’t want to write just another murder-mystery, the likes of which had been cluttering stages for decades and which, while successful, weren’t particularly innovative. And then a coffee table book on Greek temples caught his eye: “Idly turning the pages, I came to notice that as time passed the Greeks gradually reduced the number of columns on which the roof and architrave rested, and that as a result of having fewer visible means of support the structure appears mightier and more impressive.”

According to Shaffer, “the conclusions were easy to draw” – he removed the wife and mistress, focused on the male protagonists and then, in a particularly inspired turn, decided to murder the lover at the end of the first act, although he wouldn’t be gone for long. The play was submitted to West End producers, including the éminence grise Binkie Beaumont, who declared that it wouldn’t last a fortnight: “Everyone will know the trick within a week, dear. No one will keep quiet about that.” What Binkie didn’t take into account was the British theatregoer’s sense of fair play, one which had kept The Mousetrap running since 1952. Undeterred, Shaffer pushed on.

The play went into production without a confirmed title, and Shaffer installed a blackboard in the rehearsal room where titles could be submitted and considered by the team. Anthony Quayle, cast in the role of Andrew Wyke and former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, naturally turned to the Bard for inspiration, suggesting Deaths Put On By Cunning³, which Shaffer initially liked, but couldn’t fully commit to: the play wasn’t really about murder, after all. “Surely it is concerned with the difference between pre-war and post-war Britain, as exemplified by the attitudes of the fictional amateur detectives who were always superior to the blundering professional police. Now what was that figure called?”

The plot of Sleuth is deceptively simple. Esteemed mystery author and games aficionado Andrew Wyke has invited second-generation Italian immigrant hairdresser Milo Tindle to his sprawling Norman manor house, ostensibly to discuss Milo marrying Wyke’s wife, Marguerite. But Marguerite is a woman used to the finer things in life, so Wyke proposes what appears to be a mutually beneficial solution: a staged burglary, including the very real theft of some heavily insured jewelry. Wyke gets the insurance, Milo gets to sell the jewelry for some £170,000 and go off into the sunset with Marguerite. But when the fake burglary turns out to be an elaborate trap, the game becomes one of life and death.

Sleuth was an immediate hit, running eight-and-a-half years in the West End and a further four-and-a-half on Broadway, despite the odd grumpy review, most notably from Sir Laurence Olivier, who apparently asked Anthony Quayle what he was doing in “a piece of piss like this.” In fact, Sleuth would have run longer had it not been for the film adaptation, a move guaranteed at the time to close any successful play, and Shaffer was wary about selling the film rights. He was also wary about the proposed cast. Like any playwright with a hit on his hands, he wasn’t keen on changing too much. Anthony Quayle and Keith Baxter might have been exemplary stage actors who had helped shepherd Sleuth to Broadway, but neither was a draw at the box office. Director Joseph Mankiewicz favoured Olivier (who had apparently changed his tune since opening night) for the role of Wyke and, after Albert Finney was discarded for being “too plump” and Alan Bates rejected the role after only watching the first act of the play (believing Milo to be a one-act part), Michael Caine was cast.

Both actors came with baggage. Caine was reluctant to go toe-to-toe with Olivier, saying it “would be like fighting Rocky Marciano with one hand tied behind my back”. In the early ‘70s, Caine was seen as a movie star rather than an actor, even though he’d earned an Academy Award nomination for Alfie (1966), while Olivier was the great (and thoroughly intimidating) stage actor, whose filmography largely consisted of supporting roles in large movies and adaptations of theatre work. Olivier was also in poor health, exacerbated by Peter Hall’s machinations at the National Theatre⁴, which resulted in Olivier’s ousting as director and considerable media attention. Medication for his various ailments meant he struggled with his memory and Shaffer’s complex dialogue refused to stick: “[Shaffer] has written it as an author speaking in a way that an author would like to speak, and that’s not a very colloquial way of speaking … and those long, alliterative lists of things are always difficult to put in the right order, as they derive from the author’s struggle for the mot juste and abound in literary references.” A truncated two-week rehearsal period didn’t help. When Olivier approached Caine asking to run the play, Caine told him to “forget about the yesterdays and tomorrows, and just concentrate on the pages we’re shooting today.”

The differences between the two actors make for essential viewing: Olivier was rarely seen in a comic role (at least on film), and his Wyke is a fine example of how mercurial he could be on stage, a fluttering of accents (some more successful than others), poses (including a glimpse of his talent for Restoration comedy), and malevolent glints, all delivered with a restless energy and the kind of vocal control that could take him from purr to squawk in a single sentence. Wyke is a batty, baronial, bigoted bastard, the kind of upper-class, self-regarding viper that slithers all over this sceptred isle. Caine’s Milo is an affront to everything Wyke holds dear: the “foreign” hairdresser, with his self-made status and flashy suits, appears to be little more than a “jumped-up pantry boy”, his sophistication an affectation that slips along with his accent whenever he’s challenged, and his working-class animal cunning no match for Wyke’s noble mind.

Sleuth is as much a class war as it is a comedy-thriller, with both actors leaning into their statuses as theatrical knight and working-class star. Shaffer’s script plays into this wherever possible: the original play was stuffed with antisemitic slurs (Milo is both Italian and Jewish), but while there are ethnic slurs hurled at Milo in the film (who now happens to be lapsed Catholic), they’re a small part of a larger class prejudice reflected in Wyke’s insufferable detective St John Lord Merridew, a corpulent know-it-all whose noble mind frequently baffles the thick-headed local constabulary. Wyke, like Merridew, sports the kind of self-regard that comes not just with intelligence, but with privilege, and he can’t resist flaunting it, either through open hostility towards Milo or chuckling microaggression with the thoroughly blue-collar Inspector Doppler.

And here we come to the “trick” that dear Binkie felt defined and ultimately limited the play, a trick that admittedly works much better on stage than it does on film: Wyke appears to shoot Milo at the end of the first act; Inspector Doppler arrives in the second act to investigate Milo’s disappearance, gathering evidence that suggests Wyke killed him, much to Wyke’s mounting panic. It is then revealed that Doppler is in fact Milo in disguise. In the film, much like the original stage production, the secret was kept by crediting phantom actors: Phillip Farrar “played” Doppler on stage; Alec Cawthorne – “a veteran stage actor making his movie debut”, according to a clearly winking Roger Ebert – in the film. The stage actors all had their own biographies in the theatre programme; Cawthorne apparently had his own dressing room at Pinewood, even though it was a closed set. In addition, the film credits two male actors (who play the non-existent police officers at the end) and – in a lovely All About Eve in-joke – Eve Channing as the largely unseen Marguerite (whose likeness is actually that of Joanne Woodward).

Despite the best of intentions, neither Caine’s performance nor the prosthetics are particularly convincing and, while it’s a fun turn of events, it’s somewhat implausible that someone like Wyke – as self-obsessed as he is – would be fooled by a rubber nose and a dodgy West Country accent, though in many ways it is a keen satirical take on the work of John Dickson Carr (who Wyke resembles, just as his detective bears a striking resemblance to Gideon Fell), where preposterous turns were par for the course.

And this is where Sleuth triumphs: it is a postmodern work that appears, at least initially, to be part of the traditional form. It also adheres to an internal logic often lacking from other comedy-thrillers, which tend to wallow in the artifice of the theatre, establish the game between players and audience, and present their twists as gotchas. To Shaffer’s credit, Sleuth isn’t particularly interested in playing with the audience outside of the Milo/Doppler twist; its game is not with the viewers, but between the two men. And it is a peculiarly British one, where civilised conversation turns to ritual humiliation and murder, and the escalating scavenger hunt that makes up the final half-hour pushes the envelope further, calling to mind not Agatha Christie but John. Even if the violence in this stretch is largely assumed, the sexual element is incredibly discomfiting, and calls to mind not only the satirical Jacobean revenge tragedies of John Webster, but also Shaffer’s other 1972 thriller, Frenzy.

All of this is kept in line by Joseph Mankiewicz⁵, a director with extensive experience of dense scripts (The Philadelphia Story) and stage adaptations (Julius Caesar, Guys and Dolls, Suddenly, Last Summer). Sleuth would be his swan song, and the shoot was physically painful (thanks to back problems and a leg injury on-set that meant he had to direct from an antique wheelchair), but Mankiewicz’s work is focused and subtly brilliant: the otherwise set-bound film never stops moving, he manages to balance his two leads’ differing tempos, and his attention to various bits of business (such as the farce of Milo’s break-in attempt) is flawless. He knows better than to stamp his mark on proceedings, adopting a more theatrical directing approach, focusing on the performances, the writing, and Ken Adam’s elaborate set design. He also saved the film from the sticky fingers of executive co-producer Edgar J. Sherrick, whose demands ranged from including an intermission to cutting the inspired title sequence with Adam’s dioramas and John Addison’s witty overture. In the end, Mankiewicz appeared pleased, if exhausted, with his last feature: “I always used to say, jokingly, after Cleopatra that what I wanted was a picture with just two actors and a telephone booth. Well, I finally got it.”

Despite some misguided reviews from the likes of Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann and Andrew Sarris, all of which felt that Sleuth was essentially trivial and cocked a snoot at Olivier’s overtly theatrical performance (“a gentleman-bitch George Sanders role” - thanks, Pauline), others like Roger Ebert and Janet Maslin got the joke, even going so far as to highlight Alec Cawthorne’s performance. The film enjoyed reasonable box office and Shaffer “was able to say to the New York Times, with not wholly convincing braggadocio, that I was at least the only author who ever had his entire cast nominated for an Oscar.”

Alas, 1973 was a very good year. Both Olivier and Caine would lose to Marlon Brando in The Godfather (a role once mooted for Olivier), while Mankiewicz would lose to Bob Fosse for Cabaret, and John Addison to Charlie Chaplin and co. for Limelight. The film would suffer further at the hands of Bristol-Myers Squibb’s entertainment division, which owned distribution rights and promptly folded, leaving Sleuth (and Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid) in distribution hell. This means that decent physical copies of Sleuth can be difficult to track down, so we can only hope that some bright spark has uploaded it to YouTube, because it’s well worth two-and-a-bit hours of your time. I also happen to be one of the few fans of the 2007 revision (it’s not quite a remake) with Caine relishing the Wyke role and Jude Law as struggling actor Milo (who almost pulls off the Doppler), even if Pinter’s script needed a more sensitive and less trite director than Kenneth Branagh.

Fast forward five years. By 1978, Ira Levin had already carved out a singular career as a novelist with a knack for groundbreaking, high concept thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil. Levin’s career as a playwright was less successful. While his stage adaptation of Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants had stormed Broadway, his other work struggled to make a mark. Four years after the desultory reception of the tricksy shocker Veronica’s Room, Levin decided to put his frustrations on the stage in the only way he knew how – as a comedy-thriller.

Deathtrap was years in the making, based on a simple idea: “the initial situation of a playwright who’s blocked, and suddenly there’s this perfect play sitting on his desk. And I knew it was some kind of trap – someone was trapping someone; that it was a fake.” His playwright is Sidney “four flops” Bruhl, who is sent a perfect play for perusal (titled, naturally, Deathtrap and so good that “not even a gifted director could hurt it”) by one of his students, Clifford Anderson. Much to his wife’s horror, it becomes obvious that Sidney plans to murder Clifford and pass off the play as his own. By the end of the second scene of the first act, he has done just that, but the murder is just the beginning of the twists to come.

This was all too much for Richard Eder in the New York Times: “There was a bleak cartoon – Spanish, I believe – that showed a woman performing a striptease. She removed her clothes, piece by piece, and when they were all off she proceeded to take off her legs, her head, her torso, until finally there was nothing. Deathtrap … is something like that.” He complained that the play was essentially a series of endings that kept taking over from each other, ultimately deadening the audience to the surprise. As someone who had no doubt seen multiple variations on the comedy-thriller, his review sounds nothing less than utterly exhausted with the whole subgenre.

Audiences disagreed: Deathtrap was an immediate hit, with Warner Bros. picking up the screen rights for a record-breaking $1.5m less than a month into its original Broadway run and a flurry of big names (Jack Lemmon, Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman) trying to attach themselves⁶. The play would run for four years and almost 1,800 performances, garnering multiple Tony nominations and an Edgar for Levin (previously awarded to Shaffer’s Sleuth)⁷. Turns out the only thing audiences love more than a good twist is a whole barrel of them, but Deathtrap was too valuable a Swiss watch to hand to anyone but a specialist.

Sidney Lumet was no stranger to adapting plays to film; he used them as palate cleansers in between larger movies, and Deathtrap was no exception, following hot on the heels of his police corruption epic Prince of the City (1981). Some of Lumet’s finest hours on film – 12 Angry Men (1957), Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), The Offence (1973) and Equus (1977) – had been energetic stage or teleplay adaptations where his talent for blocking, collaboration, and encouraging career-best performances came to the fore. Lumet’s approach to film adaptations was to largely leave the play alone: “I don’t believe in opening it up if you lose tension, lose characterisations or lose the story … It’s a psychological thing. Confinement can work for you.” Supporting Lumet was the powerhouse adaptor Jay Presson Allen, who had managed to wrangle the non-linear Prince of the City into respectable shape and who was about to take a scalpel to the play: “Ira Levin’s script is very, very clever and a little profligate. He gives you six laugh lines in a row. And reversal, reversal, reversal. When you take his script and go down the page, there’s feed line, laugh line, feed line, laugh line. A film audience won’t buy that. There must be reality about the situation.”

So Allen set about whittling the play script into a semi-realistic screenplay, while also adding bookend scenes, much to Levin’s chagrin - “the opening⁸ and ending of that movie sort of set my teeth on edge, really” – which established Sidney’s failure as a playwright and addressed the play’s difficult comic coda respectively. This final scene, in which the cursed Deathtrap claims further victims, is a bit of an odd final turn in the play which unfortunately needs to exist to balance the structure of the piece – Levin noted that the only production that cut the final scene was also the only production that ran barely a month – but which can feel bathetic in performance, relying heavily on somewhat broad supporting characters. After the carnage of the finale, Sidney’s attorney Porter and eccentric psychic Helga rehash the events thus far, before falling into a brawl over who gets to claim the play as their own, complete with comedy insults like “Dutch pervert!” Allen’s solution is neat enough: instead of Porter and Helga arguing over who gets to own the play, the screen version simply cuts from the final battle to a stage version of it, and crowns Helga the winner of the Deathtrap game as she enjoys the rapturous reception, thus switching the coda from screeching farce to a cynical punchline.

Otherwise, the film version of Deathtrap is remarkably faithful to the play and all the better for it. Michael Caine is no longer the suave seducer of Sleuth: after a spotty ‘70s career that included classics like The Man Who Would be King (1975) and travesties like The Swarm (1978), Caine had become something of a pay-day performer – The Hand (1981) paid for a garage extension and Jaws: The Revenge (1987) would famously pay for a “terrific” house – with occasional triumphs. And there’s a certain flopsweat-drenched, midlife-crisis charm to his Sidney Bruhl, previously played by John Wood in “an absurd geriatric shuffle, bent over like an arthritic grasshopper”, even though he was the same age as Caine at the time. Caine’s Sidney is less elderly than he is exhausted by failure – “nothing recedes like success” – and his apparent desperation for a hit is less a case of his desire for financial or critical success than it is a need for change. After all, he has a devoted wife in Myra (a typically superb Dyan Cannon⁹), a house in the Hamptons, and enough weapons on the wall to start a small war; but these trappings are, much like the events of the first act, a façade. What first appears to be a crime of financial gain turns out to be a crime of misplaced passion (with, okay, a bit of financial gain), in which Sidney goes from murderer to potential victim during the interval, and the following hour of reversals and reveals needs Caine’s down-to-earth charm to keep it all plausible.

While Sleuth basks in theatricality and gamesmanship, and excels when its characters are at their worst, Deathtrap demands a base level of empathy and realism in its performances. Caine and Cannon make a fun couple, Cannon in an unusually meek comic role, bringing a dangerous spark to Sidney’s will-he-or-won’t-he murder plot, but the most impressive (and some might say unexpected) performance in Deathtrap comes courtesy of Christopher Reeve.

Reeve was the go-to good guy in the early ‘80s, thanks to his career-making role as Superman and the lovelorn Richard in Somewhere in Time (1980). His performance as Clifford leans heavily on his screen persona to date: a decent, innocent guy caught up in machinations beyond his control. He is an affecting lamb to the slaughter, which makes his subsequent heel turn all the more shocking as he switches from blank-faced himbo to dead-eyed opportunist, though some members of the audience were more upset by a Caine-Reeve kiss (not in the play) than Clifford’s reveal as a seething sociopath. Reeve would continue to struggle to secure morally ambiguous parts, instead veering into Ralph Bellamy territory (literally so in 1988’s Switching Channels), so his Deathtrap turn is all the more impressive for its rarity in his filmography, almost guaranteed to throw a new viewer for a loop. I know it did in our house.

The cast is rounded out by Henry Jones as the affable attorney Porter Milgram and an ostensibly vaudevillian performance by Irene Worth as the Dutch psychic Helga Ten Dorp. Both were veterans by this point, though it should be noted that Worth had a significant career behind (and in front of) her, once described by the New York Times as “just possibly the best actress in the world” for her Hedda Gabler. Like Olivier in Sleuth, it can sometimes be difficult to align this kind of praise with her performance in Deathtrap, but there’s no doubt she makes an impression in a role that could have been (and often is) painfully one-note. Her Helga may appear to be little more than premonitions delivered in a chewy Dutch accent, but Worth brings a subtle venality and terrier-like tenacity to the role, which is most apparent in the final scene. Overqualified supporting actors have long been the secret sauce in Hollywood for good reason: they know how to turn the underwritten into the memorable.

As with Sleuth, only a few critics had anything positive to say about Deathtrap. Again, both Ebert and Maslin understood that the film was going for unabashed entertainment and it delivered, but others felt that it was a gimmicky play turned into a minor Lumet movie. Like most comedy-thrillers, it fared better with audiences (those who hadn’t been spoiled by an unfortunate article in Time) and remains a classic for those viewers who like a hefty slice of meta with their murder¹⁰, as well as those - like Your Humble Narrator - who can never quite remember all the reversals because our minds are old and feeble.

As for the postmodern comedy-thriller as a subgenre, it remained popular on stage, with Shaffer attempting to repeat the success of Sleuth with Murderer (1975) and Whodunnit aka The Case of the Oily Levantine (1977) with diminishing returns, and Levin would return to the straight comedy of Break a Leg (1979) with disastrous results. While there were many other pretenders to the comedy-thriller throne, including Simon Gray’s Stage Struck (1979), Levinson and Link’s Guilty Conscience (1980), and Rupert Holmes’s Accomplice (1989), very few managed to make the leap to the big screen (Guilty Conscience became a 1985 TV movie starring Anthony Hopkins), and even fewer managed to have the kind of long-running success of Sleuth or Deathtrap¹¹. In fact, the only play that surpassed both is Warren Manzi’s Perfect Crime (1980), which manages the feat of being the longest-running play in New York City history (some 14,000 performances) despite being utterly terrible.

The truth is (no final twist here - sorry) the comedy-thriller isn’t so much a tough sell as it is a tough write, and one that only gets tougher the more pretenders there are to the throne, each of them eroding the novelty. The lesser comedy-thrillers live or die by their twists. What makes Sleuth and Deathtrap so special is not that their reversals (mostly) work brilliantly. They’re special because their characters, performances and dialogue make them eminently watchable, time and time again.

1. For no less a British institution than Pearl and Dean, which means that Brits of a certain age now have “Asteroid” rattling around their skulls.

2. For those curious among you: Black Comedy is a one-act farce set during repeated power cuts. Its gimmick is that the lights are up whenever it’s supposed to be dark and vice versa. Done well, it’s an absolute hoot. The Royal Hunt of the Sun is no slouch, either.

3. Horatio’s penultimate speech in Hamlet: “So shall you hear / Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, / Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, / Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause …” The Mousetrap’s title also comes from Hamlet. And I’m glad Shaffer didn’t use it, because I was really struggling for a title for this - cheers, Tone.

4. Michael Blakemore’s memoir Stage Blood goes into gory detail about this. No love lost between Blakemore and Hall, who was something of a divisive figure.

5. An entire chapter of Kenneth Geist’s Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz is devoted to Geist’s time on the Sleuth set. Geist also rightly states that “negative reaction to Sleuth has much, I think, to do with the critics’ essential dislike of the play’s constant cleverness and ornate speech and their foreknowledge of its symmetrical plot.”

6. Burt Reynolds also tried to nab the rights when the film was in production. God knows what that would have looked like.

7. In an odd twist, both play and film were part-financed by Claus Von Bülow, no stranger himself to accusations of attempted murder.

8. Set at Bruhl’s latest flop play Murder Most Fair, which just happens to be playing at the Music Box Theater and using the original Deathtrap set.

9. Her performance was nominated for a Razzie, which she lost to eleven-year-old Aileen Quinn for Annie, which just goes to show how despicable the bloody Razzies are. If you weren’t already painfully aware, I will brook no criticism of Dyan Cannon.

10. One lovely touch: the play within the play uses exactly the same set description, including the mention of a working fireplace. Worth a read if you get a chance.

11. For a full overview of the postmodern comedy-thriller, I highly recommend Marvin Carlson’s Deathtraps. Some of these plays are completely nuts.