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.
