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.

Olde Review: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

"I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey."

The following was part of a series reviewing the ASUW film series at the University of Washington that were broadcast on KCMU-FM in 1976--I found the old scripts and thought it might be interesting to post them here--with no editorial alteration. I have no doubt that my attitude to some of these films has changed over the years--ageing does that--but to just erase my opinions from back then and tack on my new-found objections would do a disservice to the reviewer who was just a "stinky kid" back then. It'd be like --I don't know--talking over a movie or something! Or throwing bread at the screen!

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) This Saturday's films at 130 Kane Hall are The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Private Parts. They're a little freaky. No. They're not. They're a LOT freaky. Take, for example, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Rock biggie Lou Adler produced it. Jim Sharman directed it with assistance from a lot of other people's work, notably Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise. And like ...Paradise, it's a rock-musical-horror-picture hybrid. Unlike ...Paradise, Rocky Horror has a sci-fi element and a great deal less subtlety.

You know the plot. Two nice people--two niiiiice people (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon)--are driving down the road during a rainstorm. They get a flat tire and look for a phone, and, of course, they come upon a light in the House of Dr. Frank N. Furter, scientist.

Dr. Furter (Tim Curry) refers to himself as a "trans-sexual transvestite from Transylvania" and when he first appears in stilletos, garter belt and heavy make-up, there's more than enough evidence to take him at his word. As with Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, the sexuality that's only hinted at in the early "Frankenstein" films of James Whale is made overt. No longer do we have the Father-Creator/Son-Creation love of the first "Frank.." film, this scientist creates "Rocky" as a...toy.

It's bizarre. Maybe too bizarre for some.* But as long as the thing takes itself so lightly, it's harmless and engaging. Half-way through the third reel**, however, the film begins to take itself somewhat half-way seriously and bogs itself down.

But there are things to recommend: the special effects of Wally Veevers, who worked on 2001, the performances of the actors familiar and unfamiliar, especially Susan Sarandon (Joe, The Front Page, The Great Waldo Pepper) and one of my favorite actors Charles Gray--he plays every role the same way, and his, by no means, small role as the Narrator of the film is in his finest arch tradition. But the actor who steals the show is Tim Curry, mincing around the thing like Carol Burnett playing Gloria Swanson. Whatever reservations you may have of the film, it is his force of personality and presence that makes the whole thing work as well as it does.

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I sound like such a prude with this. But, it was 1976 and that was a long time ago.

One can't argue with Rocky Horror as a cultural phenomenon, but it still doesn't hold up too well as a film. Perhaps that's why it ended up as such an "audience participation" project (well, that and the music and the dancing--duh!)--"Mystery Science 3000" never took on any classics. It offers a chance for the audience to camp-out and out-camp the film.

And it bears a re-visit: the print I saw of it had severe sync problems--10 minutes out of sync, actually. That can spoil your appreciation of anything! And Tim Curry vaulted from this into mainstream films--but he's never had a role that so dominated a film as this one.

Also...and this has nothing to do with the movie...there was a teaser trailer attached to the film for a film I'd heard a couple of rumors about and was interested in seeing: a little movie called Star Wars.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is part of the National Film Registry. Bra-vo to the Library of Congress. Let's do the Time-Warp again.

* This was written in 1976, and Rocky Horror had only been released the previous year and died a grisly and unprofitable death at the box-office. You know...the rest of the story. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was, appropriately, unearthed and brought back from the dead at revival houses and turned into a Midnight Movie staple--not so much for the film, but for the lively audience participation. The Rocky Horror Picture Show struck a chord in the youth market and any excess displayed in 1975 became a part of the popular culture...to the horror of some. But you can't argue with success. FOX did a remake of it and aired it on October 20, 2016...on broadcast television. Times change and culture changes with it.

** I was watching a 16mm print, but I would hazard a guess to say that I'm referring to the point in the big "RKO" extravaganza where Frank N. Furter must face his demise. Bummer.

The Hunt for Red October

The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1989) We're grudging fans of Alec Baldwin in the BXC household, so every so often it's nice to go back and see "serious actor" Baldwin before he stretched his comic chops (an opportunity made common by this film's seeming omnipresence on cable channels these days). "The Hunt for Red October" was a dry-as-a-bone Tom Clancy novel based on a long-rumored incident involving a Russian nuclear submarine accident that Clancy turned into a cat-and-mouse game between a defecting Russian sub commander, and the American and Russian fleets in the North Atlantic. In the book, the action was sometimes intriguing, but the characters were non-existent, right down to the motivations of Captain Ramius, and the novel's Clancy-stand-in-hero Jack Ryan.

Producer Mace Neufeld (who must have had the patience of a saint given his long-term producing relationship with the late Clancy) turned it into a first-class film of intrigue top-heavy with male actors (by my count the only females are two stewardesses, Gates —Star Trek's "Dr. Crusher"—McFadden as Mrs. Ryan, and the kid who plays Ryan's daughter). So, here's the run-down: Baldwin, Sam Neill, James Earl Jones, Scott Glenn, Courtney B. Vance (making the most of a great part), Richard Jordan, Joss Ackland, Stellan Skarsgard, Peter Firth, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Curry, Fred Thompson, plus comedian Rick Ducommun and I swear I see Michael Biehn in the helicopter scene. And as the man everybody talks about, Sean Connery as the Scottishly-accented Lithuaninan Comdr. Ramius.*

It all works, as a spy/adventure story, as a detective story, a military exercise, and a submarine movie...and a character piece. Nobody comes out and says anything about their feelings, but actions define the characters, and with all the sub-time, there's a lot of celluloid of people standing around talking..and for the most part it's good functional talk that propels the movie along. Plus, you'll come away with a gloss of submarine tactics, of sonar capacities, the strategies of "arming" torpedoes, and a healthy respect for the difficulties of landing a jet-aircraft on a carrier during bad weather.** 

Respect also for Baldwin, who managed to make a human being out of the cypher of Jack Ryan through the force of his own personality--his Ryan is something of a geek, like Ben Affleck's later interpretation--and proved himself an adept for actor imitations (nice skewering of Thompson and Connery there, Alec) Plus, a crisp snap to the brim for suggesting and making good on the overhead shot of Ryan cutting his tether from a helicopter to gain entry to an American sub during a violent storm, and looking UP at the camera to make sure we all know it's actually him (pre-CGI) doing the stunt.

There was minimal CGI involved—and in fact, due to budget constraints, the filming of the underwater scenes were as low-tech as you could get—suspended model shots of subs were puppeteered through underwater landscapes filmed in a dry warehouse filled with smoke. Crude particle and wave generation was all that was needed to complete the image. But it's indicative of the back-to-basics approach to The Hunt for Red October--an old-fashioned sea-hunt that satisfies.

* The script, by Donald E. Stewart and Larry Ferguson (who also wrote himself a good part in it) is augmented by dialog commissioned by Connery from one of his favorite writers at the time, John Milius, his director in The Wind and the Lion, and Milius provided him some lovely chewable dialog throughout the thing, as in...this scene. 

** But my favorite moment in the movie is a brilliant stroke--the smooth transition in dialog from Russian to English as Firth's Political Officer reads a passage from a bible owned by Ramius' late wife: the camera moves in on Firth reading the passage--Revelation 16:15-17--(in Russian) and stops on one commonly-pronounced word--"Armageddon"--and when the camera begins to pull back, he continues...in English. It's a neat trick, perfectly strategized and played...like so much of the movie.