Sleuth. 1972. UK/USA. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Screenplay by Anthony Shaffer. With Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier. 35mm courtesy Academy Film Archive. 138 min.
“Sleuth was the hardest and the best work I had done up until then,” Michael Caine observes. “It was a two-handed show and the other hand was Lord Olivier, the greatest actor in the world. I was the greatest actor from the Elephant and Castle.” Adapted from Anthony Shaffer’s fun house of a play, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Sleuth affords us the devilish pleasure of watching a titan of stage and screen (and “an incorrigible upstager and scene-stealer”) put the screws on poor Caine—somehow appropriate to Olivier’s performance as the famously pompous author of detective novels who must lure his wife’s lover (a common hairdresser, no less) to his country estate to do him in.