Children's Hour

THE DEADLY TRAP

Directed by RENE CLEMENT Screenplay by SIDNEY BUCHMAN and ELEANOR PERRY

Buried beneath the rubble of what once must have been a plot is a good idea. Two children (Michele Lourie, Patrick Vincent) are trapped in a cavernous old mansion, locked inside an abandoned room by a sinister and anonymous adult captor. A premise like this offers abundant opportunity to explore the fears and phantoms of childhood, perhaps even its pathology, and to investigate the same dark corridors that Richard Hughes probed in his magical novel A High Wind in Jamaica. Surely we might have expected Rene Clement, the director of Forbidden Games, to take at least a similar course, but from the look of The Deadly Trap the thought never occurred to him. Neither, apparently, did much else.

Far from being the subject of this flaccid thriller, the children are gimmicks, vehicles for a couple of nasty turns that the story occasionally musters the energy to take. The film's focus -- gauzy at best -- is on the parents, a mismatched pair of young marrieds living testily together in Paris.

Faye Dunaway, the mother, has the gaunt and skittish look of someone who has not quite fully recovered from a recent famine. Frank Langella, the husband, is constantly petulant, like a male model who has just had his week's bookings canceled. He is, however, supposed to portray an author, and spends some time looking at slides representing various facets of modern architecture. Dunaway apparently does not comprehend the exact nature of his work, for when he seizes her rudely one night and tries to have his way with her on a table top, she spurns him with a nasty "Why don't you go back to your equations?"

There are a great many other such inconsistencies, perhaps furnished by the charitable scenarists as a game, like one of those "What's Wrong With This Picture?" illustrations in puzzle books. As for the two kids, it turns out something called "the organization" is responsible for spiriting them off to the old house. Frank, it seems, was formerly an industrial spy of the first rank. He has been trying to go straight, but "they" won't leave him alone; "they" threaten drastic measures if he doesn't accept another assignment. Dunaway and Langella are desperate, desolate at the loss of their children, although their performances are so consistently immune to emotion that we have only their word on that.

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