Synopsis
Sidney Bruhl is a struggling playwright, who runs into a former one-time student named Clifford Anderson. Clifford has written the perfect play, and Sidney desperately wants it to bring is career back to the peak it deserves. Clifford, of course, won’t give it up willingly, so Sidney and his weak-hearted wife, Myra, have to ‘convince’ Clifford to give the play to Sidney. Regretfully, all is not what it seems.
Ninety percent of Deathtrap is absolute brilliance. It’s a movie about playwrights, set primarily in one location, that treats itself like a full Broadway spectacular. It’s always fun to see movies mimicking stages, and Sidney Lumet’s Deathtrap does it perfectly. Giving complete credit to Ira Levin’s play by the same name, Lumet does a fantastic job with keeping the audience interested in the locale, and the heavily dialogued characters. The entire aurora of the play blankets every facet of this film.
Only rivaled to that is how wonderful the actors are in the movie… with the exception of Dyan Cannon’s performance (we’ll get to that in a second). Michael Caine delivers an excellent performance as Sidney Bruhl, who is a character filled with tension and a wee-bit of madness. Caine’s Sidney embodies the desperation of a failed writer, who incensed jealous reaches it zenith when a former student shows up with what Sidney deems one of the best plays he has read. The late Christopher Reeve plays Sidney’s former student, Clifford. Reeve makes Clifford into a shiny new soul, who just wants to have his play made at any cost.
Together, Reeve and Caine form an onscreen back-and-forth cat and mouse performance that is pretty impressive to watch unfold. This is the first time in a while that I’ve seen Reeve without a Superman costume, and Deathtrap really shows the extent of his acting ability. It’s sad that he’s gone, but performances like this help us to remember how truly gifted he was.
Having said that, I think that Dyan Cannon’s Myra Bruhl deserved what she got in the film. While this is certainly a one-dimensional character (she serves only one purpose… you’ll find out early), she just doesn’t seem as attached as everyone else to her role. Her dialogue is delivered wrong, her screaming is absolutely grating to the ears (you’ll see Caine’s Sidney go nuts on her at the beginning because of it — you’ll agree with him) and she just doesn’t do a good job. Her performance in Heaven Can Wait was far better than this one. Hell, her performance in Caddyshack II was better than this one. Anyway, she is the weak link out of the three in Deathtrap.
Getting back to my original statement, 90% of this movie is damn good. You’ll be on the edge of your seat with the amount of tension and thrills that it brings. When you get to the ending, you’ll be absolutely disappointed. I felt like the ending was way off base, and could think of 10 other ways it could have ended better. It just seemed like it deserved better than what it receives.
I won’t ruin it, though. For the first Blu-ray coming from Warner Archive, it’s not a bad start.
Speaking of Blu-ray, how did it do in the HD transfer? Well, it did pretty darn well. While not perfect, the movie certainly looked pretty darn sharp on the Blu-ray format. You get a little bit of graininess, no artifacts, and you completely get zero color banding. Considering that most of the movie is played in one place, and most of the action is at night, it’s impressive that there was no color banding in the darkness. Anyway, the transfer was great for a first-time film on Blu-ray. Warner Archive did an impressive job with it, so let’s hope they can keep up the good work on future video releases.
On the flip side to that coin, you only get a DTS-HD version of the audio in 2.0. While I can’t blame them for not choosing to jump to 5.1, my speakers didn’t exactly love the 2.0 setup. Aside from this, the movie comes in at a 1.85:1 ratio.
There are no features included.