Murder By Death (1976) / Clue (1985) If there was ever a genre ripe for parody, it was the Agatha Christie template of assembling a disparate group of people in one single location, killing off one of them and then force the survivors of the group to solve the crime before the killer bumps off more of them.......
Supreme Broadway and movie gagmaster Neil Simon stepped up to the plate first with "Murder By Death"....
With an assembled all star cast, Simon's original screenplay, stuffed to the gills with literally hundreds of the playwright's patented one liners, mercilessly mocked the most famous detectives of films and literature.
Assembling for a storm-swept night at a spooky old house were David Niven and Maggie Smith spoofing the 'Thin Man' married detectives, Peter Sellers as the Charlie Chan knockoff, James Coco lampooning Hercule Poirot, Elsa Lanchester doing the Miss Marple thing and finally Peter Falk as the hard-boiled, wisecracking Bogart-ish private eye.
For even more additional laughs, the film threw in Alec Guinness as the mansion's mysterious blind butler, comedian Nancy Walker as a mute maid and in a bizarre casting glitch, author Truman Capote as the snarky, sly host of the evening.....and inevitable murder victim.......
.......or was he?
The perpetual stream of Simon-ized laugh lines comes at you speedier than fastballs spewed out of a pitching machine, and you can easily picture the cast struggling to control their own infectious delight at sending up these well worn characters.
And as playwright Anthony Shaffer did in his scripts for the Hercule Poirot whodunnits like "Death On The Nile", Simon aims more than a few satirical barbs at the inherent racism and snobbery found in Agatha Christie;s 'old dark house' setup.
Though a box office and critical success, "Murder By Death" didn't spawn any onslaught of murder mystery spoofery from other filmmakers or studios.
We'll now fast forward to 9 years later, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous.....with the release of "Clue", one of Hollywood's first attempts to craft a narrative feature film out of a completely different form of entertainment......in this case, an adaptation of everybody's favorite rainy day Parker Brothers' board game......
So you could reasonably know where to lay the blame for the eventual plague of rotten movies based on video games.......
To their credit, the makers of the 'Clue' movie did take meticulous care in creating amusing facsimiles of the game's character as well as the geography of the playing board itself.......(and yes, we mean all those various rooms where you'd have to figure out if it was Miss Scarlet in the kitchen with a knife or Col Mustard in the library with a rope.....)
If only they'd asked Neil Simon to write the script......
The writing-directing chores fell to Jonathon Lynn, who managed to sporadically sprinkle his script with some funny lines and bits of business.
But mostly, Lynn relied heavily on frantic, overdone slapstick farce to pump up the laughs. When dialogue failed him, he resorted to having his ensemble cast run from room to room in a clustered group, like a stampeding herd.
The overall result was a mere fraction of the laughs that 'Murder By Death' generated. Sometimes 'Clue' erupted into genuinely funny moments but the bulk of it carried the stench of a worn out Jerry Lewis groaner.
Watching it again 36 years later, we well understand why it bombed so badly, even with its labored gimmick of putting it into theaters with three separate surprise endings......(all video releases and airings now include all three finales together)
And yet over the years, many folks still fondly remember it and newer audiences fully embraced it for its strenuous silliness.
So now it's thought of as a rediscovered cult hit. Go figure.
We really can't get on board with the whole 'new cult hit' stuff. For all its determined nuttiness and fine ensemble cast (Martin Mull, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Leslie Ann Warren, Eileen Brennan, Michael McKean, Tim Curry, Coleen Camp)......it's not all that funny.
For the real laughs, we'll stick with Neil Simon and "Murder By Death" - 4 stars (****).....as for the clueless 'Clue', even at its peak, it never rises above 2 stars (**).
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