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.

A Tale of Two Trumans

A Tale of Two Trumans
or:
The Back-Stabber, Back-to-Back

Infamous(Douglas McGrath, 2006) There've been competing underwater worker movies, meteor movies, volcano movies, Mars movies, Wyatt Earp movies (and we just barely avoided competing King Kong and Alexander the Great movies) but of all the subjects in all the world for Hollywood to glom onto in a feeding frenzy of competition, the unlikeliest is the story of Truman Capote's self-possessed tussle writing "In Cold Blood." The first released was Capote featuring Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning performance. The last out of the gate was Infamous with Toby Jones' portrayal of the writer that is far more flamboyant and less "interior," even though the British Jones is more the stature and timbre of the real Capote. Even though Jones doesn't have that far to stretch, he does, and his Capote is such a flagrant little creep that you wonder why anyone in Kansas would trust him with any details of the Clutter Family murder, much less give him the unprecedented access that he received. There are just as many well-known actors in both movies, but Infamous feels like stunt-casting, with Sandra Bullock as "Nell" Lee, Sigourney Weaver as the socialite wife of William Paley, and an out-there Juliet Stevenson as Diana Vreeland. Daniel Craig is all wrong as Perry Smith in age, power and accent. Ultimately, both films leave the distinct impression that Capote (the person) is a selfish bastard willing to sacrifice anything (including himself) for fame and fortune, but Capote (the film) drives the point home more fiercely, and with just the appropriate amount of a sense of tragedy. Infamous merely wallows. 

Speaking of which...

Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005) Phillip Seymour Hoffman is a big guy, with a big head and a massive frame, but dressed in too-big clothes and a girdling way of holding himself, he more than suggests Truman Capote's small stature with just a hint of his persuasive power (Infamous goes out of its way to show Capote swaying the Kansas-folk with his championship arm-wrestling—Hoffman never goes there, as that would ruin his "contained" illusion. Where Infamous is loud and obvious, Capote is quiet and persuasive, less sentimental and also less brutish. The same people shared in Infamous and Capote are quieter in the latter, Catherine Keener a quiet, decent, supporting Harper Lee, and Chris Cooper, concern etched into every line of his face, is a more dignified Sheriff Dewey than Jeff Daniels' more brusque version. And there is less melodrama in Capote, and a cold persuasiveness and cruelty in the way Capote insinuates himself into the lives of Dick Hickox and Perry Smith to get their story, then leaves them hanging (very literally!) while he dawdles writing, awash in an anticipation of the acclaim he is sure he will garner. At one point, Smith asks if "In Cold Blood" refers to their murder, or Capote's behavior. It's a fair question. One wonders ruefully how Capote (the little creep) could live with himself for the remainder of his life. One has little sympathy for the plight of Hickox and Smith (though Perry is played very effectively by Clifton Collins), but Capote's treatment of them, while simultaneously playing the victim himself, bordered on the monstrous. But that was evidently a role he relished (see picture).