Murder by Death (1976)0

 

Director: Robert Moore Scriptwriter: Neil Simon Cinematographer: David M. Walsh Editor: John F.Burnett Composer: Dave Grusin Written by Neil Simon, Murder by death is homage to great lit­er­a­ture detec­tives as well as famous onscreen detec­tives. Mystery fiction’s fans would enjoy Murder by Death thor­oughly.

The great­est detec­tives have been invited to Whodunit for a “din­ner and mur­der” by a bil­lion­aire, Lionel Twain. With arro­gance in play, the detec­tives ver­bally wres­tled one another in the game of one-up-manship. As the detec­tives and com­pan­ions waited for their din­ner, Lionel made a grand entrance at the din­ing room. He chal­lenged the detec­tives to solve a mur­der that will be com­mit at 12 o’clock and reward a mil­lion dol­lars whoso­ever do so. Unfortunately as soon as the mur­der was com­mit­ted, the detec­tives started fin­ger point­ing and squab­bling among one another.

Playing so well as eccen­tric and flam­boy­ant (which was very much like his real-life per­sona), Truman Capote was nom­i­nated for a Golden Globe. Unfortunately, This was the first and last time act­ing for this author of suc­cess­ful film adap­ta­tions such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and In Cold Blood (1967).

The great­est detec­tives and their com­pan­ions are intro­duced one by one as they make their way to Whodunit. Peter Sellers is accom­pa­nied by his Japanese adopted son, Wille, who is also as known as his num­ber three son. An Xerox copy of Charlie Chan, Sidney Wang speak in Chinese-accented bro­ken English, at the same time, insert­ing his own insight­ful “Chinese” proverbs in his con­ver­sa­tion: “Question like athlete’s foot, after a while, very irritating.”

Milo Pierrer is a pas­tiche of Agatha Christe’s Poirot. Portrayed by as glut­ton, the bulgy Belgian is seen goug­ing a choco­late bar and accused his Belgian chauf­feur, for stash­ing “buns” away from him ‚when the “buns” the chauf­fer was refer­ring to were his bones. Interestingly, role of Milo’s chauf­feur was Young James Cromwell’s debut fea­ture role. In his most recent film The Queen (2006), James Cromwell acted side by side with Helen Mirren as Prince Philip.

Sam dia­mond, played by Peter Falk, is a hard-boiled no-nonsense pri­vate eye typ­i­cally found in film noir dur­ing the 1940s. Despite being gra­ciously aided by Elieen Breenan as his trusty sec­re­tary, Tess Skeffington, he appeared to show min­i­mal con­cern for her. As their car ran out of gas and they are stuck in the mid­dle of the wood, Diamond demanded Skeffington to travel to the near­est gas sta­tion (which was nowhere near them) to fill up a gas can. Diamond is dis­tinc­tively the anti­hero among the detec­tives, being tact­less with his words and

Dick and Dora Charleston is a posh detec­tive cou­ple, mod­eled after Nick and Nora Charles from the Thin Man film series. Dick also silences his wife if she tries to med­dle in men’s busi­ness, in which in their case, solv­ing murders.

Lastly, Jessica Marbles is a repro­duc­tion of Miss Marple, Agartha Christie’s another brain­child. Miss Marple and her nurse, Miss Withers has a fairly amus­ing entrance as the film plays around with our expec­ta­tions. We auto­mat­i­cally assume when they enter the room, the one on the wheel­chair would be Miss Marple and the one push­ing the wheel­chair is her nurse, instead it is quite the opposite.

To add the com­edy of the film, the per­son­al­ity of these detec­tives is vastly exag­ger­ated and as well as flawed to the point, that makes them quite unlikable.

Though Murder by death’s com­edy is witty , it does fol­low a very con­ven­tional mys­tery fic­tion plot. Firstly, It is a clas­sic who­dunit. This essen­tially means the plot is revolved around find­ing out the iden­tity of the mur­derer. To make it also impos­si­ble, every­one has a ulte­rior motive for com­mit­ting the mur­der. Furthermore,Murder by death does not limit itself to one mur­der only, sig­nal­ing that every­one is in peril. Like many oth­ers who­dunit, Murder by death is set in a secluded loca­tion, a house out in the coun­try­side, trap­ping them with the murderer.

However, Murder by death does poke fun at the con­ven­tions of mys­tery fic­tion. First and fore­most, all detec­tives seem to be omni­scient. When the detec­tives gath­ered around the din­ing table for din­ner, Sidney Wang man­aged to point out that his glass of wine is con­t­a­m­i­nated with a taste­less, odour­less, colour­less ancient poi­son before even drink­ing it. When Twain is revealed to the mas­ter­mind behind the mur­der­ing busi­ness, he rebuked the detec­tives for cheat­ing the mys­tery fic­tion read­ers by “with (hold­ing) clues and infor­ma­tion that made it impos­si­ble for us to guess who did it”.

Murder by death does not over­sat­u­rated itself with com­i­cal moments, nor stray away from the plot, keep­ing a good bal­anced of both with humour and seri­ous mys­tery. The only dis­ap­point­ment I had with the film was it was way too short at only a mere 94 min­utes. On top of it, I felt that the movie ended abruptly as though the writer was run­ning out of ideas. Still,whoever enjoys Murder by death do check out The Cheap Detective (1978),which was the same writer and fea­tures Peter Falk too.

Film reviewed by Marilyn Wong