Must-have movies: Sleuth (1972)
The classics that every film-lover will want to own. This week, Tom Cox admires an underrated, eccentric thriller
Of the two memorable British films scripted by Anthony Shaffer in the early 1970s, it's The Wicker Man that bags the cult plaudits, but Sleuth, from the previous year, is possibly the more accomplished - sharper in its plotting and barely less spooky.
Centred on a cuckolded mystery novelist (Laurence Olivier) and his wife's lover (Michael Caine), and the games they play on one another in the former's rural retreat, it is a film that works best on its first viewing, but offers surprising rewards on repeat visits.
I have watched Sleuth six times, and still it wrongfoots me, such is the nimbleness of its storyline, the denseness of its mind games. It begins as eccentrically as it goes on: Caine's Milo Tindle searching for Olivier's Andrew Wyke in a maze, after accepting an invitation to discuss Wyke's wife's future. First, Wyke has the upper-hand, as he guides Tindle through his creepy, mansion, tricks him into staging a break-in for insurance purposes, and shoots him with a blank.
In the following two hours, however, the power swings repeatedly, as each makes the other sure his life is about to end, until this is less a film about two men arguing over a woman than a lethal, unadulterated battle of intelligence. It's a tribute to the intoxicating lack of breathing space that it's easy to forget that only two actors are involved.
One day, I'll know each twist by heart, but even then, I'm sure there'll be plenty to enjoy - not least the strong, dual sense of nostalgia: for the crooked, dying way of English life that Wyke represents, and for that early 1970s period of unease-inducing moviemaking (Don't Look Now, Witchfinder General) that Sleuth epitomises.
Sleuth (1972)
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