J.L. Mankiewicz
Gli Insospettabili

'The Unseen' (Sleuth) by J.L. Mankiewicz (GB-USA 1972): theater, mathematical showmanship, exquisitely refined set design expressionism, the sparkling intelligence of a rigorous pessimism.

There are many aspects to admire about this film. A wealthy and refined mystery writer (L. Olivier) invites to his labyrinthine villa his wife's lover, a fashionable hairdresser (M. Caine), a parvenu son of an Italian immigrant, to propose a fake robbery that will allow the betrayed man to pocket a large insurance payout with which to disappear into thin air with his lover, and for the betrayer, the opportunity to keep a wife whom he does not esteem. In reality, he has a diabolical plan in mind to humiliate his hated rival enriched by his skills as a detective writer, but he will be repaid in kind, in a game of clues and increasingly dizzying traps.

It would be reductive to speak only of class struggle, a theme certainly familiar to the director (consider Uomini e cobra), which here is embellished with deliberately bombastic dialogues up to caricature. The clinical (and cynical) eye and the labyrinthine mind behind the camera taper down to the abstraction of a black amusement of the highest class, where the characters' psychology seems removed, while actions and words seem to follow the formulas of a luxuriant algebra: move, counter-move, prediction of the move in a whirl of deceptions, impossible to describe point by point. It feels like witnessing a kind of pure acting, because the director stages a comedy of two intelligences clashing for the pleasure of surpassing and destroying each other, because the two extraordinary actors embody two figures devoid of soul, but composed only of intelligence and greed that almost coincide in a dark and wickedly autotelic self-affirmation (perhaps it's no coincidence a portrait of a beautiful woman is often framed, whose identity as Olivier's wife or mistress is never clear: the object is an interchangeable pretext for surpassing one another in the struggle for self-assertion that sees no others but oneself, until one's own ruin). The ruthless clarity with which the two lead themselves towards nothingness is framed by the villa full of memorabilia (excellent set design by Ken Adam) the static and overabundant backdrop opposing the frantic pace of the action: puppets, contraptions, cards, costumes, masks from which wise shots often peek. Objective correlative opposite, yet equal, to the same fiction portrayed by the characters: baroque and vacuous puppets those, puppets Olivier and Caine, mannequins of their astonishing and vain intelligence and will engaged in their own destruction.

Deliberately over the top, I'm not sure if it can be a tragicomedy, a thriller, a parable, a diversion of the great noir genre, certainly a difficult genre in which only a director with the right credentials can avoid making mistakes and falling into banality. To me, it is a film of great charm that can provoke thought, amaze, and astound. On the actors' front, Olivier's greatness was already known. The very young Caine, I believe in one of his first films, provides a demonstration of sure talent.