New York writer Ira Levin enjoyed early success on Broadway in 1955, adapting the Mac Hyman novel No Time for Sergeants as a vehicle for rising star Andy Griffith; the play ran for nearly two years and was made into a 1958 feature film, also starring Griffith. While most of his subsequent theatrical endeavors closed within mere days of opening, Levin enjoyed considerable success as a novelist, with his 1967 best-seller Rosemary's Baby adapted as a successful motion picture by Roman Polanski in 1968; subsequent film adaptations of his novels The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil stamped Levin, as Stephen King put it, as "the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels."
Levin's eighth Broadway play, Deathrap seemed, at least superficially, to be a warmed-over reboot of Anthony Shafer's masterful Sleuth (first staged on London's West End in 1970 and then transferred to Broadway that same year, the play was adapted as a feature film in 1972 starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine) and Agatha Christie's long-running whodunit The Mousetrap -- essentially a two-hander about a has-been playwright who considers improving his professional stock by stealing the work of a promising adept and murdering the younger man to boot. Opening at the Music Box Theater in February 1978 with British actor John Wood as the blocked Sidney Bruhl and Victor Garber as the blandly ambitious (but possibly secretly duplicitous) Clifford Anderson, Deathtrap ran for nearly four years, racking up close to 1,800 performances.
A hit with theatre-goers and critics alike Deathtrap was tapped for a motion picture adaptation before the play concluded its Broadway run. With Sidney Lumet set to direct, the time was right for Lumet to call in that favor from Michael Caine. Having weathered in his career to that time more misses (The Swarm [1978], Beyond the Poseidon Adventure [1979], Ashanti [1979]) than hits (The Man Who Would Be King [1975], Dressed to Kill [1980]), Caine jumped at the chance to work with the meticulous but assured New York director, then making his return to the whodunit for the first time since Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Equally enthusiastic to work alongside Lumet and Caine was Christopher Reeve, who saw in the role of the deceptively collegiate Clifford Anderson an acting opportunity that had not availed itself in his career-defining turns in The Adventures of Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980). Rounding out Lumet's principal cast were Dyann Cannon (in the role of Sidney Bruhl's weak-hearted wife) and Irene Worth (as a psychic hanger-on with a habit of popping in at the most inopportune time).
Though Deathtrap would not be one of his New York movies, concerned as had been The Pawnbroker (1964), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Prince of the City (1981) with the intricacies, indignities, and insanity of navigating the Manhattan labyrinth, production was nonetheless kept close to home. Interiors were filmed at East Harlem's Pathé Studios, while exteriors of the Bruhl country home (the stage play's sole setting) were filmed in East Hampton, Long Island. For scenes set inside a Broadway theatre that bracket Deathtrap, Lumet hit upon the only logical choice: to set up his cameras in the very place where Deathtrap was still playing to capacity houses: The Music Box Theater. (The production would later shift to the Biltmore Theatre, for the last six months of its celebrated and lucrative run.) To avoid hampering the influx of ticket takers, Lumet shot his theatre scenes for Deathtrap on Mondays, when the playhouse was dark.
At the time of its theatrical roll-out in March 1982, Deathtrap received an inordinate amount of press, yet for a reason that had little to do with the storytelling craft of either Ira Levin or Sidney Lumet. [Spoilers ahead! If you want to experience Deathtrap fresh, stop reading here!] In opening up the stage play, screenwriter Jay Presson Allen (whose first film credit was for writing Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie in 1964) had foregrounded a bit of narrative business which Levin had kept offstage: namely, the homosexual relationship between Sidney Bruhl and Clifford Anderson, revealed as Act II yields to Act III as Deathtrap's big plot twist. The onscreen kiss shared by, as the audience now recognizes them, conspirators Caine and Reeve was meant to be the film's Psycho (1960) revelation, a water cooler moment to get moviegoers talking, but Time spoiled the shock in its review and cost the box office $10,000,000 in ticket sales.
Deathtrap garnered respectable - it not rave - reviews and earned a modest profit. Whether the film was a successful adaptation remains a bone of contention, with some critics praising Lumet for elevating the quality of Levin's derivative play and others opining that Levin's genius was diluted in the transfer. The film's controversial kiss, designed to shock heterosexuals who presumably should not have seen it coming, received a problematic response from the gay community, who found in the depiction of same-sex psychopathy the age old slander they had endured in William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), Gordon Willis' Windows (1980), Ed Bianchi's The Fan (1981), and countless Hollywood films in which homosexuality was treated as the tip of a sociopathic iceberg. (Aggravating the issue was that Caine had played a closeted gay man in California Suite [1978] and a transvestite razor killer in Dressed to Kill). Other voices of dissent included that of a preteen moviegoer who, as Reeve met Caine in Deathtrap's pivotal moment of liplock, exclaimed "Superman... how could you?"
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Making Movies by Sidney Lumet (Bloomsbury Publishing PFG, 1995)
What's It All About? by Michael Caine (Random House, 2012)
The Elephant to Hollywood by Michael Caine (Macmillan, 2010)
Ira Levin obituary by Margalit Fox, New York Times, November 14, 2007
The Lavender Screen: The Gay and Lesbian Films: Their Stars, Makers, Characters and Critics by Boze Hadleigh (Citadel Press, 2001)
Ira Levin obituary by Christopher Hawtree, The Guardian, November 15, 2007
