As Epinions writeoffs go, I have bad karma on an almost Kervorkian level. I mean well, really I do, but nothing ever seems to go right for me – meaning I can never get my hands on the right movie in the right span of time. So to Knix and the other participants of the tribute to Sir Alec Guinness* I apologize. At the risk of sounding like a total loser, the library ate my homework. I requested a VHS copy of Kind Hearts and Coronets a good nine days before the scheduled writeoff, and at the time, it was on the shelf at another branch. The transfer usually takes a day or two, but my video is still ubiquitously “in transit,” stuck in some kind of bookmobile limbo.
So at the last minute, when I realized I couldn’t count on tax dollars to bring a movie directly to me, I went video store hopping. I had a list of Guinness movies I wanted to review – his title role in Hitler: The Last Ten Days piquing my curiosity the most – and struck out on nearly all counts. I couldn’t even find Bridge on the River Kwai at Blockbuster. It wasn’t that their copy was checked out; they didn’t appear to have a copy in the first place. The only Guinness movie actually on the shelf at any of the three stores I visited was a tattered copy of Scrooge, a 1970 musical starring Albert Finney (most recently of Erin Brockovich) that had Guinness as “a surprisingly fey Marley’s Ghost.” Leonard Maltin’s words, not mine, and ‘twas definitely not the season for a Christmas musical. (In my world, it rarely is that type of season.)
I waited another 48 hours for Kind Hearts to appear – no dice – and then made the rounds of video stores once again. This time I turned up a copy of Murder By Death, a 1976 mystery spoof written by Neil Simon. It was toward the top of the Guinness list I’d prepared days before, thanks to its promising cast, veteran writer of crisp, dry humor and, well, the fact that the only other movie like it I’ve seen was Clue! Which has its charms but could definitely have been done better.
All this said, I found my Guinness quest to be well worth the frustrating effort, even if Murder By Death isn’t strictly a Guinness movie. It’s a self-indulgent ensemble piece starring David Niven, Peter Sellers, Peter Falk, Eileen Brennan and Truman Capote, among others, but Guinness holds down the entire first act as the blind butler of the spooky, spacious mansion in which the film is set.
His first task is to stamp the invitations sent by the mansion’s quizzical, head-trip owner (Capote), soliciting the world’s five greatest detectives to “dinner and a murder.” If you guess that blind Guinness affixes all the stamps to the table by mistake, you’re a half-step ahead of what will soon be an abundance of transparent, uh, sight gags. Some of the humor in Murder by Death is painfully obvious, but the surrounding atmosphere is intelligent enough to pull it off and the principle characters impossible to dislike.
As the movie opens, the detectives – each traveling with a companion – are making their way, through thick fog and over a broken bridge, to the mansion. Falk plays the Sam Spade knockoff, doing a cross-eyed, hilarious Bogart impression, while Sellers is in Mickey-Rooney-in-Breakfast-at-Tiffany’s territory with his Chinese-stereotype take on the fortune-cookie wisdom of Charlie Chan.** Elsa Lanchester plays the Miss Marple character, while Niven and his wife (Maggie Smith) skewer detectives Nick and Nora Charles and James Coco does a knock-off of Agatha Christie detective Hercule Poirot. If you don’t recognize a couple of these characters, don’t worry – I wasn’t overly familiar with them, either, and I still enjoyed the movie.
Guinness welcomes the guests one pair at a time, addressing dead air stumbling around and showing them to their rooms. He also welcomes a new cook, who happens to be deaf and mute. (She holds up a piece of paper announcing the fact, but it obviously does no good.) So at nine, when dinner is served, the guests find themselves faced with invisible soup, and Guinness is flustered. It’s here, a good halfway into the movie’s running time, that Capote makes his first appearance, promising a million dollars to the person who solves the murder that will take place at midnight. The victim? Someone at that very table. The murderer? See previous.
Obviously, Murder By Death has no actual merit as a mystery, but in skewering books from the genre that introduce strange characters in the last five pages, it works almost perfectly as a satire. The key is that the actors are clearly enjoying themselves, but not so much so that they feel the need to ham it up and riddle the production with inside jokes. No, it’s just an enjoyable, intelligent Neil Simon effort (if you like this one, check out the unofficial sequel, The Cheap Detective) that has held up surprisingly well in the wake of much broader and tackier parody films. The movie could have gone on without Alec Guinness in the mix, true, but it wouldn’t have been as good.
* = Guinness tribute participants include Donlee_Brussel, redwolfoz, mangiotto, grouch, janesbit1, energy81, Stone77777, ZentropaJK, Brundledan, brando814, knix, Curtis_Edmonds, bigjack, Macresarf1, lars_lindahl, ChrisJarmick and psychovant. Redwolfoz’s page at http://www.redwolf.com.au/epinions/ has links to all the reviews.
** = I’ve read one Epinion that decries this movie’s “dated” use of humor based on stereotypes, which I want to rebut for two reasons. First, this is a film of cheap humor on nearly every count, and you have to take it or leave it. Why get upset over a man in yellow-face spouting horrible similes and not even the proliferation of humor at the expense of the blind, deaf, elderly, infirm and gay? Second, the real Charlie Chan character was just as stereotyped as the Murder By Death parody. This version just happens to have funnier one-liners.
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