Subtitles:

English (SDH), none

Extras:

DEATHTRAP is a wonderful windup fiction machine with a few modest ambitions: It wants to mislead us at every turn, confound all our expectations, and provide at least one moment when we levitate from our seats and come down screaming. It succeeds, more or less. It's a thriller that depends on all sorts of surprises for its effects, and you may continue reading in the confidence that I'll reveal none of them.

That doesn't leave me much to write about, however. Let's see. I can tell you something about how the movie begins. Michael Caine plays a very successful Broadway playwright whose latest mystery is a total flop. We see him at the outset, standing at the back of the house, a gloomy witness to a disastrous opening night. (It's a Broadway in-joke that the play he's watching is being performed on the stage set of DEATHTRAP.) Caine gets drunk and goes home to his farmhouse in Connecticut and sinks into despair. There is perhaps, however, some small shred of hope. In the mail the next day Caine receives a manuscript from a former student (Christopher Reeve). It is a new thriller, and Caine sees at once that it's a masterpiece. It could run for years and earn millions of dollars. As he talks with his wife (Dyan Cannon) about it, he slowly develops the idea that he could steal the play, kill Reeve, and produce the hit himself.

Sidney Lumet provides another of his film adaptations of Broadway successes -- in this case Ira Levin's 1978 clever Broadway murder mystery that starred John Wood in a triumphant turn as down-on-his-luck playwright Sidney Bruhl. Wood's brittle airiness is replaced in the film version by Michael Caine's smoldering bitterness. Sidney Bruhl is a successful writer of Broadway mystery plays who was at one time considered the Neil Simon of Broadway mystery writers. Unfortunately, Bruhl is now struggling to live up to his own reputation, suffering through a series of four consecutive flops. But then Bruhl comes upon the manuscript of a brilliant suspense drama written by unknown writer Clifford Anderson (Christopher Reeve). Bruhl, desperate for a hit play, invites Clifford to come to see him, telling him that he is interested in collaborating with him on the play. Actually, Bruhl plans to murder Clifford and pass off Clifford's play as his own. What Bruhl doesn't know, however, is that Clifford has some surprise plot points of his own up his sleeve.

Gary Tooze

December 8th, 2012