#anthony shaffer

[tyger-land]

𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙒𝙞𝙘𝙠𝙚𝙧 𝙈𝙖𝙣 1973

[jazzandpizazz]

Sleuth (1972) dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz

[eyeronmaus]

Sleuth (1972, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

[renmorris]

i love how ‘murdered in a clown costume' is such a prominent plot point in the wicker man and sleuth. i don’t even mean in a funny way. it's this fear of degradation, public humiliation, dying as a failure, dying as nothing more than a joke to your murderer. walking willingly into a trap as it closes on you.

i saw sleuth as a teenager and Wike telling Milo he was going to die as a clown after degrading his identity, detailing his bigoted hate for him so vividly made me so deeply scared. it hit me really hard. it was one of the worst deaths i could imagine. i'd seen movies with torture in them but the idea of being a joke in your final moments…

[john-deco]

So in the process of adapting Death on the Nile into a script of my own for fun, I have come to realize that Anthony Shaffer’s script for the 1978 film really deserves more credit for how it streamlined the amount of characters and motives.

[fanofspooky]

[autolabrum]

Saw The Wicker Man (1973)

Spoilers below but you should watch it, it has become one of my favorite movies.

Adored seeing this on the big screen. Lots of close-ups, lots of pain and humor much more visible. In Hardy's world of almost inescapable diffuse, fuzzy light (most intense during the shots of the eucharist, but almost omnipresent), the shots that most stood out to me are those in real darkness. The nighttime orgy, the photograph development room, the darkness under the hood of the hobbyhorse, some of the shots running through the cave, all interrupt the horrific daydream of Summerisle with a concrete counterpart, a physical reality composed of darkness. This darkness, which Howie does not desire (as a Christian who wishes to live in the light of God) and cannot achieve (even his bedroom at night is poisoned by the light of unreality developed by the island's inhabitants), can only come truly in the final shot, after he has died, neither reincarnated nor resurrected, as the light of the sun sinks beneath the horizon.

[cantsayidont]

SLEUTH (1972): Inventive, deliciously sardonic thriller, adapted by Anthony Shaffer from his stage play and starring Sir Laurence Olivier as wealthy, snobbish mystery writer Andrew Wyke and Michael Caine as Milo Tindle, an Anglo-Italian hairdresser who is having an affair with Wyke's wife. Wyke invites Milo to his country estate to offer him an unusual proposition, which turns into a far more sinister game.

Ably directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (his last feature), it often feels like an elongated COLUMBO episode: a playfully acidic, class-conscious game of cat and mouse centered on an arrogant aristocratic prick who's confident that he's clever enough to get away with murder. To say more than that would be spoiling things.

The film's chief weakness is its extreme length — 138 minutes — but even if you find yourself getting a bit restless, it remains many orders of magnitude better than the appalling 2007 remake by Kenneth Branagh. The remake features a typically fine performance by Caine (this time as Wyke), but Jude Law is badly out of his depth as Milo, and it's made almost unendurable by Branagh's exhaustingly heavy-handed direction, singularly off-putting production design, and a dreadful Harold Pinter script that retains precisely none of the 1972 film's sublime dialogue. The 2007 version is much shorter, at just 88 minutes, but Pinter guts the story so severely that it barely makes sense unless you're familiar with the earlier version, and it's mean in all the wrong ways. (It's viciously homophobic, too.)

CONTAINS LESBIANS? This would first require the story to have female characters. VERDICT: The 1972 version is marvelous, especially if you're a COLUMBO fan, but you may long for an intermission. The 2007 version is an indefensible cinematic atrocity from which only Caine emerges with any honor intact; in a more just world, it would have ended Branagh and Pinter's careers.