Murder Much Foul

At the prompting of a friend, I recently decided to check out the movie Murder by Death. This was something she remembered being rather funny when she was younger, but hadn't seen in a while. Let's make a movie night of it!

As she told me going in, this 1976 movie was really a progenitor of 1985's Clue. Both are silly-spirited comedies featuring a "trapped in a mansion" murder mystery. If you ask me, Clue perfected the formula this movie first set in place.

On paper, this should have been the better movie. Literally, in fact, as its screenplay was written by Neil Simon. He certainly started from a headier place. Rather than trying to make a movie loosely based on a board game, Simon wrote a massive literary sendup. The story features several detectives coming to the creepy mansion, each a pastiche of a famous sleuth from books: Charlie Chan, Nick and Nora Charles, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade, and Miss Marple. If you're well read in the genre, there might well be a lot of humor in there for you to enjoy. For me? Well, I was at least able to recognize who most of these people were supposed to be.

The cast is so extensive, it's almost impossible to believe. It includes Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, David Niven, Peter Sellers, and Maggie Smith. Eileen Brennan (who later played Mrs. Peacock in Clue) is there. The author Truman Capote appears as his usual, unusual self. (Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal was right on the mark.) James Cromwell is there, making his first ever film appearance. How often does a cast like that get assembled today?

But sadly, they're all there in service of a script that's not terribly funny. Oh there are certainly some laugh out loud moments here and there, but they come after long dry spells. Worse, a good amount of the humor is actually racist, or offensive in other ways. Peter Sellers is playing the Charlie Chan character, with disrespectful makeup and accent, leaving you at times to wonder how something like this continued to be socially acceptable so long after blackface was known to be improper.

As hit-and-miss as the humor is, the writing itself does no better. The pacing is terrible. It takes almost literally half the film's run time for all the characters to arrive at the mansion. The mystery that ought to be at the heart of it all doesn't even develop until there's barely half an hour to go. And it's all polished off with an absolutely non-sensical ending worthy of Scooby Doo.

But I did laugh at times. And much of the acting is oddly quite strong. Alec Guinness, for example, is pretty great in his role of the blind butler named... well, I won't say, since the name itself is one of the funnier jokes of the movie.

If this really did pave the way for Clue, one of my favorite movies (and way funnier than you'd ever expect it to be), then I'm glad Murder by Death does exist. But I'd hardly recommend it to anyone. I rate it a C+.