Clue

Clue (Jonathan Lynn, 1985) It was director John Landis who came up with the idea to make a movie of the famous murder mystery board game. "Clue" was a staple of those stacks of board games in homes (at least it was in my home when I was growing up) and it guaranteed a good hour or so of fun, even if you did lose a murder weapon or two in the set-up and take-down. 

And those murder weapons—a candlestick, a dagger, a lead pipe, a revolver, a rope (with noose!), and a wrench—were all nefariously blunt ways to dispose of people, whether in the library, the billiard room, the conservatory, the ballroom, the kitchen, the dining room, the lounge, the hall, or the study (not to mention the cellar!). What sort of sick mind would come up with this thing?

Well, apologies to Agatha Christie, but the man who came up with it was a Birmingham, Englander named Anthony E. Pratt (he died—I'm not sure by what means—in 1994), who put out a patent for a murder mystery game called "Murder!" He sold the idea to British game manufacturer Waddington's House of Games in the UK, who released the thing in 1949 under the name "Cluedo." Originally, there were other weapons including a bomb, a syringe, a shillelagh, a fireplace poker, and an axe and poison. In the U.S., Parker Brothers released the game under the name "Clue," where, on both sides of "the pond" it enjoyed decades of success, even inspiring a young boy by the name of John Landis.

Where were we?

 

It is 1954 and six Washington D.C. residents are invited to a New England mansion, Hill House, where they are escorted to dinner by Wadsworth the butler (Tim Curry) and the maid Yvette (Colleen Camp). But, why these six individuals and why are they given pseudonyms, rather than being referred to by their real names?

 

A seventh guest, Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving) arrives and it is revealed that he has been blackmailing all of them.

"Mrs. Peacock" (Eileen Brennan) is the wife of a prominent U.S. Senator who has been taking bribes. "Mrs. White" (Madeline Kahn) may have murdered her nuclear physicist husband. "Professor Plum" (Christopher Lloyd) has had an affair with a patient and lost his medical license. "Mr. Green" (Michael McKean) is gay, but must keep it secret lest he be fired from his State Department job. "Colonel Mustard" (Martin Mull) is a war profiteer selling military parts on the black market. Miss Scarlett (Lesley Ann Warren) runs a D.C. brothel. None of this looks good on a resume, which is why when they're informed by Wadsworth that they only 45 minutes before a contingent of police arrive, so they have been pulled together to turn him over to the police for his blackmailing schemes.

Well, to make a long story short,* Boddy reminds them, though, that if he arrested, he will gladly reveal all their secrets to the police, and suggests an alternative: he gives them each a weapon and suggests that as Wadsworth has the only key that will allow them to escape, one of them should kill the butler when Boddy turns out the lights. Boddy turns out the lights. When they're turned back on, it is Boddy himself who has had his lights turned out.

Oh, bother. Whodunnit?

 

Really, who cares? The strength of Clue—as opposed to Murder By Death

—is that, for a comedy, it has a fairly good laugh-to-stinker ratio. And Lynn has insisted that it proceed at a slightly faster pace than a Marx Brothers movie. Yes, it will pause for an audience laugh, but for the shortest amount of time possible, before setting up its next joke. Not only that, but it throws in a considerable amount of slapstick.

Slapstick that looks really painful.

Really painful. But, then what do you expect when you have six or seven live characters within a house with secret passages and a lot of marble flooring? There has been some careful study of early comedy films for this one and so the pace rarely flags, even, at times, it does exhaust. But, there is a measured quantity of vocal humor before something physical happens, which relieves some of that pace.

Plus, the cast is perfectly capable of tossing in a look, a reaction, a bit of business, or—in the cases of Kahn and Curry—line readings that are so exquisite that you want to hear them again...immediately. There is the little conceit of there being three endings—a fourth was scrapped—and that's a bit lame, especially as they all tend to have a momentum-crushing finality with no pay-off when you expect there should be.

The movie bombed at the box-office, but it has achieved an inexplicably ardent cult following (with some pathetic soul trying to gain hits for their podcast with the hyperbole that it's the best movie ever made). It's entertaining and even occasionally inspired, but as for it's breaking any new ground in comedy, no.

 

Talk about not having a "Clue!"

* Too late.

Murder By Death

Murder By Death (Robert Moore, 1976) Neil Simon was busy in 1976. He'd seen a successful film made of his The Sunshine Boys, his play "California Suite" was opening on Broadway, and he was re-tooling an earlier scrapped screenplay "Bogart Slept Here" (that was to star Marsha Mason and Robert De Niro and be directed by Mike Nichols) to ultimately be released as The Good-bye Girl.

 

Why, in God's name, he would write a parody of the typical country house mystery during this time is a mystery in and of itself.

 

However, I suspect the motive was money. Not only that, fellow comedy writer Mel Brooks was making a mint with genre parodies (such as Young Frankenstein), so why not? And if could it generate income as an original work, all the better.

 

The material is a bit weak, the jokes sometimes thudding, and Simon is at his best doing observational comedy as opposed to sketch-writing, which this essentially is. But, he does have a fine time making fun of some basic mystery tropes, characters and mystery writers, specifically Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett.

"You are cordially invited to Dinner and a Murder at 22 Lola Lane, Saturday evening 7 P.M." says the invitation sent to many prominent detectives. The host is millionaire Lionel Twain (Truman Capote). Using the photo above as reference, the invited guests are socialites Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith), P.I. Sam Diamond and his secretary Tess Skeffington (Peter Falk and Eileen Brennan), amateur detective Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester), Belgian detective Milo Perrier (James Coco)—with chauffeur Cassette (James Cromwell's first movie!)—and Inspector Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers).* The blind butler, Jamessir Bensonmum (Alec Guinness) assists with the help of deaf and dumb kitchen-maid Yetta (Nancy Walker).

It's a wonderful cast. One wishes it was just a better movie, starting with the premise: at dinner (after various attempts on their lives) Twain appears and challenges the detectives to a sort of duel: he has come up with a mystery that he believes they cannot solve—a murder is going to occur in the house at midnight and both the killer and the victim are in that room. If the mystery is solved, that sleuth wins $1 million. The group then finds a couple of victims, disappearing bodies, disappearing rooms, and many courses of unchewable dialog and rather stale jokes.

But, it also has conflicting stories, made-up alibi's, mutually exclusive excuses, and a double-cross that should have been clever, but is only saved by Alec Guinness' sheer brio in his willingness to get laughs.

Oh, there's a couple of things that work. The mansion's door-bell is Fay Wray's scream from King Kong and that manages to be a consistent laugh just as the horse-scream whenever "Frau Blücher's" name is mentioned worked in Young Frankenstein. There's a nice gag when Nancy Walker's deaf-mute maid runs into the dining room and screams...in total silence. And the cast is uniformly game, but the stand-out is Peter Falk's Sam Diamond, evoking Bogart's gumshoes to a tee.**
 

Ultimately, Murder By Death merely kills a couple of hours.

* The inspirations for these characters are (of course) Nick and Nora Charles from Hammett's "The Thin Man", Sam Spade from Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon," Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and Earl Derr Biggers' Charlie Chan.

 

** Falk would get his own sequel of sorts—The Cheap Detective—from the same writer-director team.