Successful playwright of stage mysteries Sidney Bruhl (Michael Caine) has his difficulties coping with the giant flop of his newest play. Sure, his rich wife Myra (Dyan Cannon) – I assume a former actress going by her enormously dramatic personality - would be perfectly okay to take care of both of their needs, and she’s clearly not the kind of woman who’d care about this as saying anything about him. Alas, that’s not something Sidney’s ego seems to be prepared to deal with.
He’s so obsessed with regaining success, he begins having rather murderous thoughts when a former workshop student of his, Cliff Anderson (Christopher Reeve) sends him a copy of a new play he hoped Sidney might help him sell. Which shouldn’t be a problem at all, for Sidney finds the play not just to be eminently marketable but also basically perfect. So perfect, murdering Anderson and stealing his work if the opportunity arises becomes more than the joke Myra believes it to be to him.
And that’s where I shall hold the plot synopsis part of this write-up, before any of twists in this utterly brilliant Sidney Lumet adaptation of Ira Levin’s only successful play start happening. Actually good twists that work with established characters, details and motivations are much too rare to waste, after all, and the film at hand does have rather more than one of them.
That Lumet is a great director hardly needs mentioning, but it is probably worth saying that this one lacks the didactic manner he sometimes could fall into, replacing it with a large amount of wit. Particularly seen as the adaptation of a stage play, Deathtrap is a very energetic film. Lumet often seems to put his camera into the scenes as another actor instead of going the respectful and a bit dull route of many of a screen adaptation of a stage where you might as well watch the stage play itself and not a movie. There’s never a feeling of the director doing too much, visually, though, or of getting in the way of the script or the actors. He’s there to enhance, deepen and assist, and he’s doing an incredible job at it.
Of course, the script (adapted by Jay Presson Allen) is rather on the brilliant side. It doesn’t just present a twisty, and often very funny, murder mystery, but also pokes and prods at the form it is working in on a meta level. Never in an obnoxious, too-clever way, mind you, but always deepening what’s going and making it more interesting and more emotionally and intellectually complex, as little getting in the way of pace or characters as Lumet’s direction is.
The acting is up to the same standards, all three members of the main cast shifting the tones of their performances in ways that feel natural and logical, without showing off with it. That Michael Caine is brilliant in any film he’s in not only to pay his rent is obviously no surprise, but Christopher Reeve is also so good it’s basically revelatory to me, putting a guy I’ve never had all that much time for as an actor (though he was a perfect Superman, of course) really on the map for me. Dyan Cannon was apparently a victim of a critical drubbing when this came out, but really, she’s playing an incredible high-strung woman just as extremely as she needs to be played. Cannon’s also not leaving it at “high-strong”, but also shows the nuances of emotion and thought under that obvious surface layer; that the woman she’s playing isn’t subtle about her emotions and thoughts does not mean her emotions and thoughts have no subtlety, and Cannon’s performance is a masterclass in how to show this, at least to my eyes. The only performance here that’s really rather one-note and over the top is Irene Worth as our detective of the evening, psychic Helga ten Dorp, but that’s the perfect choice for this character in the context of this particular movie as well.
Masterclass really is the word that comes to mind for the whole of a film where script, direction and acting come together to reach astonishing heights as easily as Deathtrap seems to do.