Word: schaffer
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...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...
...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revealing Wyke's vindictive hypocrisy and then having Tindle attack Wyke's books as "the normal recreation of snobbish, outdated, life-hating, ignoble...
...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...
...large part of Filion's success can be attributed to his encyclopedic knowledge of almost every standardbred he faces and his knack for recognizing and exploiting the strengths of the most unlikely looking horse. "He has the eyes of a hawk," says Owner Benjamin Schaffer, "and he never forgets anything about one of his or someone else's horse." Beyond that, Filion is a crafty reinsman who among other things, excels at a tactic that might be called the Hervé Hop. Rather than throw his horse off balance by using the reins to turn his head, Filion...
...acting is generally good. Jon Finch is strong and appropriately frenzied as the hero (who was a limping, balding, middle-aged fellow in the book); in a character created almost entirely by Schaffer, Alec McCowen scores as the civilized inspector who can't restrain his appetite...