Sleuth is a 1972 mystery film directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz, with a script by Anthony Shaffer, based on his 1970 Tony Award-winning play. The film stars Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, both of whom got Oscar nominations. Mankiewicz’s final film, Sleuth received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with an Oscar nomination for Best Director, too, as well as one for Best Original Score.
Here is a link to quotes from the film, a link to the script, and links to the full movie (in case any of them are pulled from YouTube).
Hints to what the dominant themes of the film are–theatricality, deception, mind games–are already given during the opening credits…provided one already knows better. Fictional actors’ names are listed, meant for roles that do not exist onscreen. These include ‘Alec Cawthorne’ as Inspector Doppler, who is actually played by a disguised Michael Caine; also, ‘John Matthews’ as Detective Sergeant Tarrant, ‘Eve Channing’ as Marguerite Wyke, and ‘Teddy Martin’ as Police Constable Higgs, all characters only referred to by Andrew Wyke (Olivier) and Milo Tindle (Caine), the only two people ever seen throughout the film. The reason for this deception was that the production team wanted to reveal as little as possible to the audience to maximize the element of surprise.
Another hint of the theme of deception at the end of the opening credits (as well as at the end of the film) is the framing of the visuals in a theatre stage with curtains. It’s hardly necessary to show such a framing in the cinema–as opposed to a stage production of Sleuth–unless the very idea is to stress that what we’re seeing isn’t real.
The film begins with Tindle driving into Wyke’s country manor house, a vast area of property indicating how obviously wealthy Wyke, a bestselling writer of crime fiction, is. That Wyke considers the enjoyment of his genre of writing to be “the normal recreation of noble minds” is a further association of him with the aristocracy, something against which middle-class Tindle, who “[doesn’t] know very much about noble minds,” will be sharply contrasted.
As Tindle is walking about outside trying to find Wyke, he can hear the latter reciting his prose aloud into a tape recorder. Wyke is among hedgerows designed like a labyrinth, and Tindle cannot locate the voice until Wyke moves some hedge, which has been like a wall separating the two men.
When they meet, introduce themselves, and shake hands, Wyke welcomes Tindle to “Cloak Manor,” the name of his home and yet another early indication of the film’s theme of subterfuge.
Wyke notes how “all detectives were titled,” as is the sleuth of his novels, Lord Merridew. His sleuth, far cleverer than the comparatively dimwitted and frequently baffled police detectives of his novels, represents an idealized version of his egotistical, elitist self. This is so in spite of Wyke’s claim that we are living in a “classless society,” a bizarre assertion to be made in capitalist England, when not even any of the socialist states of the twentieth century, for all of their accomplishments, ever achieved classlessness, let alone the giving-up of money or the withering-away of the state.
Snobbish Wyke would never allow his fiction to be adapted for television, which for him is “no recreation for noble minds.” Wyke leads Tindle inside, where he is now to be acquainted with Wyke’s many automata, including a sailor named Jolly Jack Tar, who laughs at Wyke’s jokes. These automata, or fake people, once again reinforce the themes of theatricality and deception.
Finally, Wyke gets to the point of why he’s invited Tindle to his home. He knows that Tindle has been having a sexual relationship with his wife, Marguerite, for some time, and so he, in all bluntness, asks about Tindle’s wish to marry her.
Normally, a man would be furious to learn that his wife has made him a cuckold, especially a man as narcissistic as Wyke obviously is. Nonetheless, he pretends not to be angry, and instead acts as though Tindle’s affair with her is an excellent opportunity for Wyke to get rid of her by having Tindle take her off his hands. Then, Wyke can be free to live with his mistress, a girl named Téa.
Wyke needs first to know of Tindle’s family background. Tindle’s answer indicates humble beginnings: his mother was a farmer’s daughter from Hereford, and his father was an Italian watchmaker who immigrated to England in the 1930s and anglicized his original name, Tindolini.
Now, just as Wyke has disingenuously claimed that ours is a “classless society,” so does he claim that, in response to learning of Tindle’s (lapsed) Catholic background, “we’re all liberals here,” and that Wyke has no prejudice against Catholics, lapsed or not. Here, “Catholic” can be seen as a metonym for ‘Italian,’ an ethnicity against which Wyke is decidedly prejudiced, as he’ll soon demonstrate.
Changing the family name from Tindolini to Tindle was meant to make the family become English, something Wyke doesn’t seem to think is possible. The fact that Tindle’s father went broke from being nothing more than a watchmaker reinforces the class divide between him and Wyke, but it must be emphasized that none of this divide makes Tindle in any way a proletarian, and it’s important to understand this fact to make sense of the class analysis of this film.
Tindle owns two hairdressing salons, one in South Kensington called Casa Tindolini, and another in Brighton. Therefore, Tindle is petite bourgeois, as contrasted with Wyke as a member of the gentry. So the nature of the class conflict as allegorized in Sleuth is not between capitalist and worker, but between big capitalist and little capitalist; and as Marx once observed, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, p. 929)
The film’s liberal bias is to have us see Tindle as the poor underdog, and therefore to have us sympathize with him. If we’re paying attention, though, by the time we get to the end of the movie, we’ll realize that Tindle is every bit as cruel in his humiliating games as Wyke is. It’s the nature of the bourgeoisie, petite or haute, to step either on those below them (Wyke), or to step on those above them in their ascendancy to the top, as Tindle is attempting to do in either cuckolding Wyke, getting money for Wyke’s jewels, or playing games of revenge on him.
Now, I mentioned earlier that Wyke pretends not to mind Tindle’s sleeping with Marguerite, but sooner or later we have to see Wyke’s narcissistic injury come out. He makes a few crude references to her copulating with Tindle, offending him and making him want to leave the house in a huff. Wyke manages to deescalate the situation by pretending to reminisce about the woman he used to love, remembering how “intolerably tiresome” she is now, and asking if Tindle can “afford to take her off [Wyke’s] hands”.
As a mere petit bourgeois, of course Tindle cannot afford the luxurious life that Marguerite has been accustomed to as Wyke’s wife. Tindle will have to help Wyke defraud the insurance company that has covered the jewelry Wyke bought for her. Wyke will recoup his losses from the insurance claim, and Tindle will get enough of a cut to subsidize her now-high-maintenance lifestyle.
Note how Marguerite’s very existence is coupled with all the expensive things to be bought to ensure that she’ll stay with Tindle and not go running back to Wyke for support. This is because she is a much an object to Wyke (and to Tindle, as Wyke imagines) as the expensive things are objects to her. In capitalism, people are as commodified as things are.
This brings us back to my point about the liberal bias of this film, which makes us see Tindle as the poor underdog, when, though nowhere near as wealthy as Wyke is, he’s as much a capitalist as Wyke is. Marguerite is Wyke’s property, and Tindle is appropriating that property for himself, as part of his ambitious upward mobility.
The actual underdogs of Sleuth are so marginalized that we never see them onscreen. They’re only referred to in Wyke’s and Tindle’s conversations: the women (Marguerite, Téa, Joyce, Wyke’s maid, his secretary) and the servants (Wyke’s gardener, etc.). They’re invisible because they hardly matter. The sexual objectifying of Wyke’s two women, in fact, is so complete that their very names sound like puns on drinks–tea, or thé in French, and margarita.
Wyke wants Tindle, disguised, to ‘break in’ and ‘steal’ the jewels, all as deception to defraud the insurance company. Though Tindle has his worries about the crime going wrong and him being charged, Wyke will reassure him that they can pull it off safely.
The two enter a room with a pool table and play a brief game of billiards as the topic of Wyke’s sexual relationship with Téa is broached. Note the sexual symbolism of the men’s handling of phallic pool cues, knocking balls into yonic holes, as Wyke insists upon his his sexual prowess…at his age, in about his mid-sixties, to go by Olivier’s age as of 1972. Such bragging is, of course, reaction formation and denial of Wyke’s actual impotence, as revealed by the end of the film, rather like how his professed liberal lack of bigotry is reaction formation and denial, as well as his supposedly not being infuriated at having been cuckolded by Tindle.
Since we’re dealing here with a young man and another old enough to be the father of the first, the two having possession, in one sense or another, of the wife of the second man, we can see in them transferences of both the Oedipus and Laius complexes. Both men, as we learn later on in the film, would be rid of the other, if not actually, then in their games’ representation of actuality, to be free to have Mama-Marguerite. Wyke may not love her anymore, but she still ‘represents’ him (i.e., she is his ‘property’), as he’ll tell Tindle with his pistol pointed at the terrified man’s clown-wig-covered head.
The reason so much of Wyke’s wealth is put into jewelry, by the advice of his accountant, is to avoid being “virtually castrated by taxation.” Having Tindle fake the grand larceny of Wyke’s wife’s jewels in order to collect the insurance money is thus one capitalist helping another to cheat the ‘socialist’ taxman in his attempt at Wyke’s “emasculation.” Wyke is thus protecting his family jewels [!].
Marguerite and the servants are all away for the weekend, during which the entire film is set, so now is the perfect opportunity for Tindle to do the fake break-in and theft. Tindle’s worries about the criminality of the act are trivialized by Wyke, who notes how “all good moneymaking schemes in England have to be [criminal] these days,” a trenchant comment on capitalism. After Wyke reassures Tindle of the safety of the scam, as well as promising him that his cut will be 70,000 pounds, in cash, tax-free, Tindle agrees to do it.
Part of the reason for the disguise, which will be a clown costume (part of Wyke’s secret plan to humiliate Tindle), is to have him wear large shoes to hide his actual footprints. Tindle follows Wyke, who leads him down–with a further demonstration of his racism by ‘slanting’ his eyes with his fingers and imitating an Asian accent–to a room holding a number of disguises, including of course the clown outfit.
As they go down there, Wyke tells Tindle of how, before television, people used to amuse themselves with “treasure hunts, charades, games of infinite variety.” Just as the modern media lies to us with its corporate agenda, so did these games deceive, as Wyke’s and Tindle’s especially will, we’ll soon see. Take whichever form it will, the capitalist class tries to deceive us, engages in make-believe, manipulates us, just as Wyke does to Tindle, then later, vice-versa.
They rummage through Wyke’s old dressing-up basket, trying out a number of disguises before deciding on the clown one. Instead of “an old pair of sneakers and a sock,” Wyke insists on the disguise having a “sense of style,” some “amateur aristocratic quirkiness,” which once again links the ruling class with the film’s theme of theatricality and deception.
All costumed up, Tindle goes outside to get a ladder to put up on a wall leading up to a second-storey window for him to break into. Since he’s about to steal Wyke’s jewels (symbolic, on one level, of emasculating him–nicking his family jewels and cuckolding him), Tindle is also, as it were, climbing the social ladder, going from middle class to upper class, as he hopes.
This going up the ladder is difficult for him, as he’s “not very good at heights,” and he hopes that Wyke will hold the ladder steady for him. This is comparable to how difficult-to-well-nigh-impossible it is to move up from class to class, in spite of such fantasies as “the American dream.” Of course, Wyke won’t help Tindle, because this fake burglary must be simulated sufficiently to approximate reality so as to satisfy the police. Wyke also won’t help Tindle because it’s only natural that the upper class won’t help the middle class rise.
As Tindle is clumsily trying to go up the ladder in those big, awkward clown shoes, Wyke is inside pretending to be a female servant hearing Tindle’s noises outside. Wyke is speaking in a falsetto woman’s voice: this is one of a number of examples of Wyke pretending to be someone else, often imitating other accents. It’s part of the film’s theme of theatricality, fakery, and pretense.
Once Tindle is inside again, he must vandalize the place in a search for jewels whose location he pretends not to know about. When he finds the safe and blows it open with explosives, he discovers a red ruby necklace. Wyke never wanted to see it around Marguerite’s neck, feeling it made her “look like a blood sacrifice.” Again, the association of jewels with balls makes his aversion to the blood red colour symbolic of castration anxiety.
Tindle, on the other hand, wishes his father could see the rubies, for the poor old man never knew what success was. Wyke, as Tindle’s father transference, thus is part of a family romance, Tindle’s wealthy dream-father, as opposed to his broke real one.
Now that the jewels are pocketed, the explosion is meant to wake Wyke up, and a struggle between the two is to ensue. Tindle has to leave a wound of some kind on Wyke to convince the police. Since it would be rather difficult to hit Wyke hard enough without hitting him too hard, he suggests having Tindle tie him up; then he imitates the cleaning woman’s voice, imagining her to have found him all tied up and working on one of his stories. More of his theatricality and pretense.
Just before Wyke throws in the first plot twist and has Tindle understand that the whole fake jewelry burglary has just been the former setting the latter up to be shot and killed with the burglary as a pretext, Wyke does a number of things to foreshadow this twist. First, with the pistol in his hand, Wyke fires at a jug in Tindle’s hand, frightening and enraging him. Then, he makes “a bad Italian joke” about it being “open season all year round for…seducers and wife stealers,” as well as deliberately claiming that Italy, not England, is Tindle’s “country of origin.” In connection with Wyke’s elitist bigotry against even other Europeans, note that his surname is a pun on white.
While his intention to kill Tindle is as much theatricality and deception as is the fake burglary, or even the intention of defrauding the insurance company, his hatred of Tindle is real. It’s bad enough for Wyke that he’s being cuckolded, his wife and ‘property’ stolen from him–the narcissistic rage he feels from that alone is unbearable; but that the other man, of all men, is even just half a “wop” or “dago” (the same way being only part-Jew is tantamount to being a full-Jew to a Nazi) is enough to require a tit-for-tat humiliation. Sleuth being an allegory of class antagonisms, we see in Wyke vs Tindle how capitalism, even between haut and petit bourgeois, is all about abasing the competition to glorify oneself.
This is why Tindle must be ‘killed’ while fully dressed in his clown costume, right after he’s tearfully begged Wyke not to kill him. Tindle must be brought down because, as a mere petit bourgeois “half-dago,” he’s “a jumped-up pantry boy who doesn’t know his place” (a line loosely quoted, by the way, in The Smiths‘ song, “This Charming Man”). Just before shooting clowned-up Tindle in the back of the head, Wyke says, “Farewell, Punchinello,” a reference to Pulcinella, a clownish character from commedia dell’arte, and its English descendant, Punch.
The scheme to kill Tindle with legal impunity from the apparent attempted burglary is, as I’ve said, all just one of Wyke’s many games of humiliation, not at all real, more theatricality and deception. The firing of a blank from his phallic gun suggests Wyke’s impotence, his own private feelings of humiliation projected onto Tindle.
After the game is over, and Tindle, having come to from fainting and having gone home, we see Wyke at home alone, gratified from the narcissistic supply he’s got from humiliating Tindle and listening to old recordings of Cole Porter songs like “You Do Something to Me” and “Anything Goes.” In the former song, “that voodoo that you do so well” reminds us of the deceptive ‘magic’ of Wyke’s games. His old-fashioned taste in music reinforces the sense of the Generation Gap between him and Tindle.
This gap between crusty old conservatives and young liberals is emphasized in the lyric to “Anything Goes.” The breaking of the old Victorian taboo of “a glimpse of stocking,” as well as the switch from “better words” to “four-letter words” (as had only about a half-decade before Sleuth‘s release been allowed in films, and before that, “the end of the Chatterly ban”), reflects a social rift that distracts us from the ongoing rift between capitalist and worker.
“Detective Inspector Doppler” arrives at Wyke’s home, saying he’s there to investigate “the disappearance of a Mr. Milo Tindle.” Now, to those who’ve never seen the film or the play, Doppler is a third character just introduced to the story, played by “Alec Cawthorne” and not by Caine disguised in a clever makeup job to make him look like a middle-aged man, almost Wyke’s age. The theatricality and deception are as much for us, the audience, as they are for Wyke. Tindle’s disguise is so complete, it even includes his use of a rhotic accent.
As “Doppler” does his investigation, he gives off the impression that not only is Wyke genuinely guilty of having killed Tindle (we haven’t yet seen Tindle as himself since the firing of the pistol, so for all we first-time viewers know, that was a real bullet fired), but Wyke has also carelessly left out circumstantial evidence for “Doppler” to find. Actually, Wyke’s denials to “Doppler” of being guilty of murder are real, for Tindle sneaked into the house to plant the incriminating evidence (blood on the bannisters, Tindle’s clothes “all screwed up on the floor of a wardrobe”) while Wyke was out of the house for the day.
In playing this game on Wyke, Tindle isn’t just getting revenge for himself; he’s also avenging the sullied reputation of police detectives, who are routinely looked down on in Wyke’s fiction as “baffled” and not particularly intelligent. It is always the noble, titled Lord Merridew who, as the brilliant sleuth, solves the case.
Wyke here is demonstrating his elitism once again, with Merridew representing the gentry, and those “baffled” police inspectors representing the common masses, as Tindle is thought of as representing. What must be remembered, though, is that just as Tindle is a member of the petite bourgeoisie and is therefore no less a capitalist than Wyke, the police, of whatever modest means they may be, represent and defend the interests of the capitalist class. So Tindle’s humbling of Wyke through the clever detective work of “Doppler” is not the working class one-upping the bourgeoisie, but rather a capitalist doing this to a fellow capitalist.
Of course, in spite of Wyke’s looking down on common cops, just as with his denial of prejudice or Othello-like jealousy, he denies that condescension by claiming that “Merridew would have been proud of [Doppler]” for being so diligent in his tireless attempts to contact Tindle by phone. Now, Tindle knows this compliment to be fake, but in keeping with the theatricality and deception going on with both men, “Doppler” says the compliment is “praise indeed, Sir,” and claims to enjoy Wyke’s fiction.
Wyke enjoys the narcissistic supply he gets from hearing that “Doppler” reads his work, but his ego trip is short-lived when he isn’t allowed to finish naming his favourite of all of his books, The Case of the Crucified Communist (the title of which sounds like a capitalist’s wish-fulfillment), before “Doppler” resumes talking about the Tindle case.
As the evidence against Wyke seems to be mounting, he and “Doppler” go outside to where the dirt has been freshly dug, implying that this is where Wyke has buried Tindle’s body. Wyke tries to maintain his innocence by saying his gardener has been “aching for an opportunity to slander his employer.” In this quote, we see not only an example of class conflict, but also one of the marginalization of a worker, one only spoken of, not ever seen.
“Doppler,” on the other hand, defends gardeners and has nothing but praise for how perceptive he finds them to be. Note here how Tindle, in taking the side of gardeners, is again associating himself with the poor, downtrodden working class, as liberals are wont to do; though as a bourgeois himself, Tindle is no more a worker than Wyke is.
Finally, the pressure rises on Wyke until the circumstantial evidence against him seems so strong that “Doppler” makes to arrest him. Wyke is now feeling a stress and fear comparable to Tindle’s when he thought he was about to die. Then, “Doppler,” behind Wyke, pulls off his face makeup, wig, etc., to reveal Tindle underneath it all.
Now, the first-time viewer sees that not only was the fake burglary artifice, but so was Tindle’s death and the very existence of Doppler, a veritable doppelgänger for Tindle. Wyke is now as enraged as Tindle was to discover his fears were all for nothing.
Tindle is not yet satisfied in his lust for revenge, though. He’s got more tricks in store for Wyke, including the next game, immediately to be played on the old man.
He insists, though, that this game he’s about to play on Wyke is not pretend. He claims that he’s actually murdered Téa and planted four pieces of evidence about the house that will incriminate Wyke, and that the police will show up in a matter of minutes, find the evidence, which is all hiding in plain view, and charge Wyke with the murder.
To agitate Wyke all the more, Tindle claims he has had sex with her, her willing to it, before strangling her to death with one of the four pieces of evidence. Wyke has been assuming that Tindle is having him on (as he should), until he phones Téa’s home, getting her roommate, Joyce, to answer the call and tearfully confirm that Téa has, indeed, been murdered.
Now that Wyke is convinced the murder is real, he frantically goes about searching for the four objects: a stocking, a shoe, a false eyelash, and a bracelet. After finding and disposing of the four things, Tindle reveals that no cops have arrived as he’s led Wyke to believe. It turns out that Têa and Joyce were happy to help Tindle get even with Wyke, for Wyke has often played games of humiliation on them, too. Wyke personifies the ruling class that humiliates the marginalized with phony set-ups, targeting marginalized people like women.
Téa, for example, is so marginalized that it takes quite some time, since knowing of her ‘murder,’ for Wyke to express any pity for her, a callousness that Tindle notes. Women like her, Marguerite, and Joyce are never seen and never heard…silenced, in effect. They are represented only in the words the two men use to refer to them.
Similarly, people of colour are marginalized in the presentation of this story, even to the point of them being marginalized, as Tindle imagines they must be (and probably correctly so, given Wyke’s obvious racism), in Wyke’s novels. Tindle assumes that blacks don’t “play much of a part in the books [Wyke] write[s]…Except for the odd, eyeball-rolling darkie, to take his place alongside the swarthy Yid, the oily Levantine, and others.” The point is that Shaffer’s marginalizing of workers, women, and people of colour by not presenting any of them physically on the stage or screen is to indicate how slightly they have been regarded in real life.
To get back to the ending, where Wyke realizes that the danger of the cops finding the four pieces of evidence is all faked, Tindle hits him with one final bit of humiliation…and this time, it’s all too real. He tells Wyke that Téa, having actually met Tindle in the house while Wyke was away, has told Tindle that Wyke is impotent and hasn’t done it with her for over a year.
This narcissistic injury is too much for Wyke to bear. He cannot risk Tindle circulating this tidbit of gossip, not even just to Marguerite. Now the pistol must have only real bullets. Tindle’s murder cannot be faked this time. The firing of a real bullet into him is symbolic of Wyke’s phallus working properly.
Tindle insists, though, that since he’s told the police about the faked burglary story after Wyke’s faked shooting of him, and…maybe…the police will stop by the house, Wyke won’t be able to use the burglary story to justify shooting Tindle. Since Tindle’s been lying the whole time, Wyke nonetheless figures he doesn’t need to believe him this time, so as Tindle is walking toward the front door with Marguerite’s fur coat (a further theft from Wyke), he gets shot in the back.
Shortly afterwards, the police do show up, as promised, by the front door. Wyke is truly screwed now, and just as Tindle’s fake murder has turned real, so is the fake danger of Wyke being arrested now real. As Tindle is dying, he activates all the automata in the room, particularly Jolly Jack Tar, notable for his hearty guffaw as demonstrated a number of times throughout the film, and now laughing with Tindle at Wyke.
If only that gun could have been, with a blank, as impotent as Wyke’s biological gun is. then he could tell the cops, “it was just a bloody game.”
The movie ends with a shot of the theatre and a quick drop of the curtains, giving off a Brechtian alienation effect to remind us that Sleuth is just a bloody play. It’s as unreal as any of the games Wyke and Tindle have played on each other.
The emphasis on the unreality of the story is to suggest that who Wyke and Tindle represent–gentry vs petite bourgeoisie, conservative vs liberal, or the opposing mainstream political parties representing these two factions, whichever–are more play-acting in their vying for power than they are really competing. We always focus on these two groups, while ignoring the politically marginalized people represented by their absence on the screen or stage.
The political tap-dance the two groups do is a distraction from the people we should be concerned about–workers like the gardener, cleaning lady, and secretary; women like Marguerite, Téa, and Joyce; and people of colour like blacks, Levantines, or in any case anyone not of Anglo-Saxon stock, like Jews…or Italians, for that matter.
We see these two mainstream groups battling it out in debates on TV, keeping the spectrum of the otherwise lively debates strictly circumscribed, so as to ensure that certain touchy issues–like poverty, income inequality, endless war, student debt, homelessness, genocide, government surveillance, etc.–are kept out of the debates, since their inclusion might threaten the capitalist/imperialist structure that the ruling class wants kept intact.
Accordingly, the two sides’ debates are all just theatre, all fakery and deception, all “just a bloody game,” like the ones Wyke and Tindle play on each other. For if the debates were real, they’d actually be relevant to the common people. And we can’t have that, can we?
Infinite Ocean 
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