Deathtrap (Warner Bros.,1982)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 18) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that he had seen when it was relatively new but not since,while I’d never seen it before at all: Deathtrap, a 1982 comedy based on a play by Ira Levin (usually known as the novelist behind such tales as Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil rather than a playwright, direc\ted by Sidney Lumet and adapted for the screen by Jay Presson Allen. Allen actually had a connection with Alfred Hitchcock; she wrote the final script for his 1964 film Marnie after Hitchcock fired the first writer he had on it, Evan Hunter, because it was a psychological tale about a woman and he thought the script needed a woman writer. The film was controversial at the time because it cast Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve as a (more or less) Gay couple right after Reve had done the second film in his Superman cycle. It’s actually more complicated than that, but 1982 audiences were shocked at the idea that the actor who’d played Superman could portray a Gay character on screen, though things have loosened up since then. The 2000 film Wonder Boys cast Robert Downey, Jr. and Tobey Maguire as Gay lovers, but that didn’t stop the folks at Disney and Marvel from casting both men as superheroes later, Downey as Iron Man and Maguire as Spider-Man.

Michael Caine plays Sidney Bruhl, burned-out playwright who’s just come off his fourth flop in a row on Broadway after previously having written hits like The Murder Game (billed as the longest-running whodunit in Broadway history – was Levin thinking of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap here?). Sidney lives with his wife Myra (Dyan Cannon), who’s a rich woman and is keepingt hem both alive on her family’s money, in what looks like a converted barn in Bristol,Connecticut. When he slinks home following the failure of his latest play (if it was so bad, why didn’t Zero Mostel’s character from The Producers do it?_,he misses the train station and has to book a stretch limo just to get himself back home. Salvation arrives,or seems to, when Sidney receives a play in the mail from a former student of his at a playwriting seminar, Clifford Anderson (Christopher Reeve),who sends Sidney a carbon copy of his latest play, “Deathtrap.” After establishing that Clifford has never written a play before and the only copies extant are Anderson’s original manuscript and the carbon copy he made while typing it, Sidney and Myra hatch a plot to murder Clifford,.steal the great play and pass it off as Sidney’s latest work.

Only [spoiler alert!] Sidney and Clifford are really lovers, and Sidney’s true plot is to scare Myra into having a fatal heart attack – which duly happens when the supposedly dead Clifford comes back to life and appears at their front door in face makeup that makes him look like Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. The intent was that Sidley would inherit Myra’s family fortune and he and Clfford could live comfortably ever after on her money. I kept waiting for another plot twist in which Myra, too, would turn out to be alive, but she’s really dead and a minister leads a funeral service for her on the bank of a river. Among the other people living in this Connecticut village are Dutch psychic Helga ten Dorp (Irene Worth, a delight), whom Sidney is afraid will sense the details of his latest scheme with her psychic powers – even though she’s a guest on the Merv Griffin Show and bombs. Only Sidney and Clifford are understandably suspicious of each other and sidney still seems to have it in the back of his head that he’s going to kill Clifford and take credit for the play all by himself. The film ultimately ends up ripping off the ending of Seven Keys to Baldpate as the entire story turns out to be the plot of a new play called “Deathtrap” written by, of all people, Helga ten Dorp – and we don’t see either Michael Caine or Christopher Reeve along the actors taking the curtain calls for this production.

Deathtrap reminded me a good deal of Sleuth, made a decade before and also starring Michael Caine,though in Sleuth he was the younger man and Laurence Olivier played the older burned-out guy. There’s some of the same devil-may-care spirit of Sleuth in Deathtrap,though at least Deathtrap doesn’t pull the bizarre trick Sleuth did of listing four other actors in the opening credits even though Olivier and Caine are the only two people in the film. It was a lot of fun despite the overly busy musical score by Johnny Mandel, particularly the opening harpsichord theme that sounded like a wind-up clock run amok. At least the three stars deliver the goods and act competently and personably, and though Caine and Reeve show no more physical affection for each other than a couple of on-the-lips kisses, it’s nice not only to see Christopher Reeve topless but to be reminded of what a hot guy he really was before the terrible accident that effectively ended his career, though he did at least two TV-movies after the horseback riding accident that paralyzed him, including a remake of Alfred Hitchcok’s Rear Window in which a genuinely disabled man played the wheelchair-using photographer James Stewart portrayed in Hitchcock’s original.