The Last of Sheila (1973)
Just enough time to get dressed as a Catamite, if I knew what it was.
(As with the previous post, I’m trying to avoid giving too much away here, but may still allude to stuff that could be considered spoilery. If you’re in any doubt, go see the movie first. It’s currently featured as part of the Criterion Channel’s Vacation Noir collection)
When legendary composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim wasn’t reinventing the musical, he was establishing himself as a formidable gamesman, stuffing his house with antique games machines, penning cryptic crosswords for New York magazine, and arranging labyrinthine scavenger hunts for his Broadway buddies. One of these hunts caught the interest of director Herbert Ross, whose second feature The Owl and the Pussycat (1970) had confirmed him as a bankable director. Ross had spent a long time trying to persuade Sondheim to write a straight play, but the composer wasn’t interested, feeling he had nothing big to say. The prospect of Sondheim writing a murder mystery – once the stalwart of the commercial theatre – appealed to both, however, and Sondheim agreed to pull one together.1 When Ross insisted he also write a screenplay, Sondheim drafted friend and scavenger hunt co-host Anthony Perkins. The initial idea – a Christie-like, single location, trapped-with-a-murderer thriller with a dusting of John Dickson Carr – was a winner with Ross in every aspect but one: “It’s terrific, but I don’t know why you’re putting it in some dreary place like Long Island in the winter. Why don’t we set it on a yacht in France and we can all have a wonderful time?”
Filmed mostly around Alpes-Maritimes on Sam Spiegel’s ridiculously large yacht over three-four months, The Last of Sheila is ostensibly a chums-on-holiday lark with sharp teeth. Bigshot movie producer Clinton Greene (James Coburn) has invited six of his so-called friends to a week of games on his yacht, titled the Sheila Greene Memorial Gossip Game. Those guests comprise Tom (Richard Benjamin), a down-on-his-luck screenwriter living largely off his wife (Joan Hackett), the beautiful but rather brainless actress Alice (Raquel Welch) and her controlling husband/manager Anthony (Ian McShane), the force-of-nature agent Christine (Dyan Cannon), and movie director Philip (James Mason). Each of those guests has been given an envelope with a secret (ranging from shoplifter to child molester) which relates to one of the other guests. Their goal is to work out which secret belongs to who, but there appears to be more afoot: it becomes clear that one of the group is responsible for the hit-and-run death of Clinton’s wife, and they’ll do anything to keep it under wraps, including murder.
“Any murder mystery is a bizarre thing,” said Sondheim. “It’s like a farce, you have to accept a slightly bizarre premise.” This is absolutely true: a good murder mystery exists in a strange, slightly surreal, borderline comic plane, one where a bunch of characters, each with equally plausible opportunity and motive, can be suspected of murder, and where they have to essentially react to that murder with only the mildest of distress. Like farce, the murder mystery depends on establishing the plausibility of implausible situations, and an audience should be able to unravel the action in retrospect. In farce, that unravelling comes through character motivation; in the murder mystery, it comes through clues, which are ideally in plain sight throughout with only the interpretation up for grabs. Both genres are essentially theatrical games, but only the murder mystery demands an audience’s intellectual participation.
Sondheim and Perkins are more than up to the task. They make their premise plausible with one genius stroke: their suspects are Hollywood types, the kind of unrepentant and self-ignorant narcissists who barely blink when one of their own is murdered, instead seeing it as a potential career boost. More subversive is the fact that the point of Clinton’s games is not to unmask a murderer; this “minor-league sadist” is instead using them to test the desperation and loyalty of his closest work friends, making them jump through hoops in order to have a sniff of work. That these games ultimately end in carnage and cover-up is a cynical take on the production of a movie, where compromise is rife and anything can be used as leverage in pursuit of the green light. As Roger Ebert rightly points out in his review: “Hollywood is embarrassed by death and turns away from it; real grief is seldom.”
Indeed, the characterisation of the seven is something of a cheeky meta-game (a “Jacqueline Susann guessing game,” as Ebert would have it): Dyan Cannon’s Christine is clearly modelled on super-agent Sue Mengers2 (though she’s considerably more energetic than Mengers ever was); Richard Benjamin’s Tom shares some traits with co-writer Anthony Perkins (also a married man who’d had homosexual relationships); Clinton feels like a Stigwood/Evans type, the kind of high-powered producer/mogul who thrived in the 1970s; and, perhaps most infamously, Raquel Welch is unwittingly playing Raquel Welch, while Ian McShane plays a version of her ex-husband Patrick Curtis.3
This kind of game-playing confused some of the cast: Sondheim noted that Benjamin and Hackett in particular were looking for character motivation and context4. Even Ross was determined to make The Last of Sheila into a Hollywood satire. “And it was a murder mystery,” said Sondheim. “And nobody would take it as such except James Mason, who raised his hand and said, ‘I have one question. I don’t understand why the piece of wood is in the robe.’” According to Sondheim, it was the only intelligent question to come out of the first read-through, and speaks to Mason’s experience: he was after all no stranger to quota quickies before he became a leading man, and he knew the brief.
Some critics were also confused about The Last of Sheila, referring grumpily to the vapidity of the movie, without realising that the vapidity is precisely the point. Whodunnits aren’t known for their thematic depth; a whodunnit populated with Hollywood types was never going to provide anything more than a solid mystery with some satirical elements. Other critics – like Molly Haskell in The Village Voice – took minor issue with what they deemed to be a “screenwriter’s movie”. While it’s true that Ross does little with the direction and it sometimes feels as if he’s struggling to keep up with what is an admittedly dense script, the notion that a murder mystery should be (even indirectly) not a screenwriter’s movie is absurd, as anyone who’s suffered through the Branagh-directed Poirot movies would attest.5
The murder mystery, and particularly the comedy-thriller, is an inherently theatrical form in performance, relying heavily on the quality of both writing and cast. The Last of Sheila has both in abundance. The script’s clues are in plain sight and its characterisations are sharp enough to be memorable, while its dialogue sports enough one-liners to warrant repeat viewing even after you know the murderer’s identity. The cast are also a joy: Coburn is a superb, hissable villain with dreams of subjugating entire islands of people; Cannon is a raucous delight; Benjamin and Hackett are fine, open-faced heroes; Welch and McShane deliver a boatload of venal charm and good looks; and James Mason, as the self-appointed detective of the group, manages to balance a performance that is both stuffy and deeply subversive in its own way. Had The Last of Sheila originated on the stage, the critical reaction would likely have been better (though many film critics got a touch snotty about the theatre); as it stood, many critics found the film a little too insider and perhaps a little too sophisticated for its own good.
Naturally, I disagree. Yes, it’s a screenwriter’s movie (heaven forfend the screenwriter get any credit for a movie6) and it’s something of a throwback to the kind of play that enjoys a long life in repertory theatre, but The Last of Sheila also happens to be that rare thing: a murder mystery that not only plays fair with its audience, but has a climax that actually works. That it’s also scabrously funny is a bonus. To ask for anything else is to misunderstand the genre, and while some of the movies it’s inspired have tried to do that (looking at you, Glass Onion7), very few of them have managed to stayed true to the essence of what makes The Last of Sheila an all-timer: that it puzzles and entertains in equal measure. And also, let’s face it, they don’t have Dyan Cannon’s laugh, which we all know is one of the most joyful sounds ever committed to celluloid.
Next Up: “The most successful man in town.”
It wouldn’t be the last, either. Sondheim would go on to provide treatments for two more murder-mysteries, The Chorus Girl Murder Case and Crimes and Variations. He would also co-write a play with regular collaborator George Furth called Getting Away with Murder which ran for only seventeen performances in 1996.
Those of you interested in Mengers would do well to pick up Brian Kellow’s biography Can I Go Now? though be aware that the word “zaftig” is used too regularly for comfort. There’s another (kind of) Mengers connection here too: the jaunty closing song “Friends” is sung by Bette Midler, who went on to play Mengers in John Logan’s play I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers in 2013.
Welch was told she was playing a version of Ann-Margret, with McShane playing her husband/manager Roger Smith. She undoubtedly discovered the truth during the shoot, which apparently made her a nightmare to work with, prompting the otherwise sanguine Mason to state that she was “the most selfish, ill-mannered, inconsiderate actress that I have ever had the displeasure of working with.” As for Mason, I don’t want to speculate who he’s playing.
Not surprising, considering Benjamin was cast without having read the script, thanks to Sue Mengers, who apparently also signed him up for Westworld in the same way. It’s also worth noting that Benjamin and Hackett weren’t Sondheim and Perkins’s first choice for the roles: that would have been Ryan O’Neal and Lee Remick, more obvious “movie stars”.
Hey now, listen, I know they have their fans. And while I’m glad they exist and prove a market for something other than Lycra-clad heroics, I am not a fan of Branagh’s take on Poirot, especially when the Shaffer-written Christie adaptations and the superlative TV series exist.
I try to mention directors whenever I can, but I do not believe the movies start and end with the person shouting “action”.
I loved Knives Out; I was lukewarm on Glass Onion, despite the appearance of Sondheim, because it simultaneously feels like it’s trying to do too much and too little at the same time. That said, I’m annoyed that it’ll be lost to the streaming ether one day without a physical release, and I will be all over Wake Up Dead Man when it finally comes out.
I *love* this movie, and that cheery "Friends" song at the end is a perfect punctuation point.
PS: I'm with you on Knives Out/Glass Onion/Wake Up Dead Man, and Branagh’s Poirot - although I did like A Haunting in Venice.