Breaking from the reclusive habits of his late years, Mankiewicz offered Sleuth as a tour-de-force summary of his career-long fascination with the idea of cinema as a dangerous game of theatrical artifice and illusionism. Anthony Shaffer adapted his own hit play about a dizzying competition between two men over the same woman – a veteran mystery writer played with supercilious charm by Laurence Olivier and a suave hair dresser played by Michael Caine – within the strange carnival setting of the older man's mansion. As the two men lock horns, inventing games and roles for each other to play, the film's narrative unravels in a claustrophobic spiral of deceit and disguise. Fueled by precisely the kind of witty, cruel dialogue perfected by Mankiewicz's earlier successes, Sleuth offers a dazzling satire of class inequity and masculine hubris that counts among his finest and most sophisticated works. – HG