In Murder by Death Neil Simon proves he’s not always the surefire comedy hotshot, Peter Sellers reminds us that his non-European comedy characters are stinkers and Truman Capote demonstrates, in his only proper acting role, that he’d have made a pretty good Bond villain.
It’s a spoof of a country house whodunit, written by Simon, directed by Robert Moore and with a cast that’s pure gold and the saving of this movie demonstrating that if you’re going to kick the legs out from under a genre, you’d better have done your homework.
The conceit that Simon has come up with is to collect all the world’s most famous detectives – names slightly changed in every case – and set them off on a whodunit investigation designed to point up the genre’s shortcomings.
David Niven and Maggie Smith play Dick and Dora Charleston, a version of The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora Charles. James Coco is Milo Perrier, a passable Hercule Poirot. Peter Falk is a Sam Spade stand-in, Sam Diamond. Elsa Lanchester is a Miss Marple knock-off, Miss Marbles (ho ho). And Peter Sellers is Sidney Wang (oh dear), a Charlie Chan he’d never get away with today and shouldn’t have in 1976 when this movie came out.
The cast is fantastic, Sellers aside. His comedy foreigners always come with a warning. When they’re from Europe he plays his creations as people who are funny because of some foible (Clouseau’s ineptitude, Strangelove’s Nazi leanings). But if they’re from further afield – India and all points East – his foreigners are funny, too often, simply because they are foreign.
That caveat aside, off this band of plucky detectives go, once Neil Simon has spent an entire third of the film introducing them, into a fiendishly twisty whodunit story of death, disappearance and duplication (bodies vanish and reappear, rooms are empty, then full) set in train by Lionel Twain (Capote), a cackling effeminate villain whose youthful looks he puts down to eating lots of vegetables and wearing lots of make-up. If you’ve ever seen that meme of Capote exiting a room at speed backwards on a chair, this is its origin, and also an indicator of the tone of the whole thing.
Round the edges a few other characters, some of whom will be more significant than others. Alec Guinness as a blind butler at the fancy house where this all takes place. Nancy Walker (Ida Morgenstern in the TV show Rhoda). James Cromwell as Perrier’s driver and right-hand man. Richard Narita as Sidney Wang’s “Number Three Son”. There’s also the redoubtable Estelle Winwood as Miss Marble’s nurse, the joke here being that it’s the nurse who’s incapacitated and stuck in a wheelchair (Winwood was 92 at the time and is a game old bird, and also funny. You might remember her as one of the dizzy old investors being bilked by Zero Mostel in The Producers).
Simon’s writing is actually quite kind to the various characters and the actors respond with performances that are the movie’s takeaway. They actually make it fun. There are jokes that are funny, though it has to be said that most of Simon’s sophisticated gags don’t land and it’s the most basic stuff – farting at one point – that get the biggest chuckles, or did from me.
Simon has little to say about his target, apart from the fact that the whodunit is an inherently unfair medium, and that its revelations, which generally come late on, make it impossible for any involved viewer to have even half a chance of guessing who done it. He makes this point again and again and again, and in several scenes reinforces it every few seconds with a new revelation – a clue, then another that contradicts the previous one, then another one, and so on. And there are character revelations – Sam Spade is gay at one point – which don’t add up to much anyway. If it’s revealed that the very swanky Dick Charleston is in fact broke – his motive for murder – in the next second it’s seemingly of no importance.
I’ll say this for Murder by Death, it really hangs on to this idea, hammering away at the notion that the country-house murder-mystery is essentially dumb, when we all kind of know that anyway, and coming up with increasingly absurd and unnecessary ways of demonstrating it.
It’s exasperating. But it has its moments and there are ways of watching it that make it fascinating. Like, for example, is Elsa Lanchester going to run away with the movie? And, in an era full of big-ticket Agatha Christie adapations (1974’s And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express, 1978’s Death on the Nile) Murder by Death was successful enough for there to be a follow-up, The Cheap Detective, in which Falk, Coco and Cromwell returned, Moore also directed and Simon once again wrote. It got an even cooler reception from the critics than this one did.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
