The Last of Sheila
Directed by Herbert Ross
Written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins
1973/US
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental
Lee: Who did this room? Parker Brothers?
This tricky murder mystery is good fun.
The film begins at a big Hollywood party. Sheila drunkenly runs off into the street and is killed by a hit-and-run driver. On the one-year anniversary of her death, widower Clinton hosts a party on his yacht, the “Sheila”, for six of the people who also attended the fateful party. Clinton is obsessed with games and has an elaborate one planned for entertainment each evening.
He assigns each guest a secret and leaves clues on shore to assist the others in discovering it. It just so happens that the secret held by a given guest will be embarrassing to another guest at the party. Each night is to be devoted to a different secret.
The guests include movie star Alice Wood (Raquel Welch), her talent-manager husband Anthony (Ian McShane), sassy talent agent Christine (Dyan Cannon), screenwriter Tom Parkman (Richard Benjamin) and his heiress wife, Lee (Joan Hackett), and film director Philip Dexter (James Mason). Murder ends the game short of its intended climax.
This is one of those light-hearted mysteries with plenty of red-herrings and a million moving parts. I liked it a lot on original release and the script remains clever. There are several false finishes before the actual end and I found the convolutions of the plot tedious after the first big reveal.
