This spine-chilling charade has good performances from Dyan Cannon, Christopher Reeve and especially Michael Caine as the once wildly-popular playwright fallen on hard times whose eyes light up when he receives a superb new play from an untried writer through the post. From here on in the plot merely trifles with its audience, deliberately changing course so often that you are finally unprepared to accept anything at face value and conditioned to expect the unexpected. No plot of any of the principals can be certain of success, no corpse guaranteed dead. It is, of course, all too far-fetched to have anything to do with real life, but simply what the French call a divertissement; very ingeniously writer Jay Presson Allen (from Ira Levin's long-running play) has diverted us too.


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