THE LAST OF SHEILA is one of my favorite films, and arguably the best mystery film ever made (and if you want to argue about it - head to the comments section!). Original Screenplay by Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates) and Stephen Sondheim (a bunch of Broadway musicals like WEST SIDE STORY) and directed by Herbert Ross. The plot is clever, the dialogue is clever and it’s a blast to watch. And it’s a movie industry story!
Egomaniacal and cruel big shot film producer James Coburn has a party at his mansion in the Hollywood Hills... where his drunk wife Sheila gets angry at something and staggers out of the house and down the winding road... where she is hit and killed by a hit & run driver - the police never discover who.
One year later, Coburn invites a group of Hollywood types to spend summer on his yacht in the Mediterranean playing games and soaking up the sun... all of them last saw him the night of Sheila’s death. They are...
Dyan Cannon as the big time agent who used to be fat - and this is a great performance - she *acts* fat, even though she’s hot. The role may have been written for a plump actress, but Cannon plays it as a recent Jenny Craig grad who just knows she’s going to put on all of the weight in the near future - she’s hitting on all of the men, and acting really insecure.
Raquel Welch as the hot movie star who is no longer in her 20s, but is still a star. But for how long? Welch will remind you of Julia Roberts today - at that strange age where you don’t know what’s going to happen to her career. She is recently married to...
Ian McShane as Welch’s Manager/Husband is great as a brawler, insecure, slice of beefcake. What is it about Welsh actors? Though this wasn’t the first film I ever saw him in, this was the first film I ever noticed him in.
James Mason is the once famous director who is now doing TV commercials and not liking it. Mason is always aloof but never mean - he’s also one of those actors who can deliver any line and make it sing. Here he’s floating along on some higher level than everyone else, but at the same time afraid he might not land a job directing Coburn’s next film.
Richard Benjamin is the screenwriter, who is broke and really needs a job. It’s strange to think that Benjamin was a star once - the *lead* in WESTWORLD - because he’s so unlike what we think of as a star today. When I first saw this film, I was a kid and wanted to be a screenwriter - so this was the perfect hero.
Joan Hackett, another forgotten star, plays Benjamin’s loyal wife - whose family has been in the film biz for generations and she has childhood memories of sitting on Mason’s lap. Hackett has family money and has been supporting Benjamin while he tries to sell a script. She says paying for everything isn’t a problem... but you can see on both of their faces that it really is.
So those are the guests on the cruise, and did I mention the games? On the first day of the cruise everyone is given a card with the name of a criminal on it, like “The Shoplifter” - none of the other players knows what criminal is on your card. When the yacht docks at some exotic locale, Coburn gives the group a clue, and then each of them scrambles to follow the clue to some other clue and find the Shoplifter’s Lair before everyone else. At the Shoplifter’s Lair is a clue with the identity of whoever holds The Shoplifter card. Once the person holding The Shoplifter card finds the Lair, the game is over and everyone else is a loser. There is a chart of who has won and lost each round in the yacht’s cabin, and the person who solves the most games is the ultimate winner (and may end up with a job on Coburn’s next film). If you have The Shoplifter card, you want to solve it before everyone else so that the game is over and you are the only winner of that round. A fun little game for rich Hollywood types to play, except - did I mention the cruel streak?
Each of the crimes on the cards are things a member of the group has actually been accused of. As is explained a bit later - Coburn wouldn’t give the actual shoplifter The Shoplifter card, because everyone would get angry and quit. So no one knows the cruel element of the game until enough games are played that the pattern appears. Oh, and one of the cards says Hit And Run Killer on it.
Okay, someone is murdered (or it wouldn’t be much of a movie) and the director and screenwriter partner up to solve the murder in kind of a Holmes & Watson kind of thing. The screenwriter, Benjamin, leading the investigation. The great thing about this film is that it completely plays fair - the audience can play along and solve the murder themselves. The clues are all there. In fact, the great thing about the ending when Benjamin and Mason are taking it clue-by-clue explaining who did it and how, is that they show you a clip from the movie you have already seen... and this time you notice the killer picking up the murder weapon! Before, you saw the exact same piece of film and didn’t notice it.
What is frightening is that Hollywood wants to remake this film... as a comedy! Huge mistake! The best way to remake this film - use the original screenplay and do not change a single word. Maybe hire a typist to change any anachronisms, but DO NOT HIRE A SCREENWRITER because they may change something that is already perfect.
Now, the reason why THE LAST OF SHEILA is like THE VERDICT is something that happens at the end of both movies, so now we’ll look at THE VERDICT and then I will put up the SPOILER warnings and discuss the endings.
THE VERDICT - not the Paul Newman film, the film from 1946 starring Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre directed by Don Siegel (DIRTY HARRY, this was his first feature) and screenplay by Peter Milne. Okay, the reason why I bought this movie from Warner Bros Archive is that Siegel is one of my favorite directors and I haven’t seen the film in decades, and even then it was on the late-late show and I was half asleep. But the film holds up and is fun...
Greenstreet (from CASABLANCA) is a prosecutor with a conscience in Victorian England who sentences a man to death... and after they have hanged him some evidence surfaces that he was innocent. The government needs a scapegoat, so Greenstreet is fired in shame. Oh, and the evidence surfaced because the man who takes his job as prosecutor, George Coulouris (usually playing the villain - hey, and he’s the villain, here, too!) will do anything to get his job. Now Greenstreet is retired, hanging out with his artist friend Peter Lorre (also CASABLANCA) and working on his memoirs. After a party at Greenstreet’s house, one of the guests is found murdered the next morning and Coulouris leads the investigation. Lots of good suspects - the victim had all kinds of enemies, even Greenstreet himself has a motive of sorts... and Lorre was near the victim’s flat the night of rthe killing. But Coulouris is an idiot and can’t seem to follow all of the clues or suspects... so Greenstreet and Lorre team up to solve the case. If they find the killer before Coulouris, Greenstreet gets to make his replacement look like an idiot.
The film is fun, with these two guys bantering and bickering along the way, and Lorre getting to play a lady’s man who hooks up with a showgirl who may or may not be a suspect. This was one of those throw-away B movie the studios used to make, and I’ll bet no one involved would have ever thought in their wildest dreams that anyone would be talking about it today... or even think about it after 1946. But the film has a breezy Sherlock Holmes feel to it, and one hell of an ending...
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You know, the problem with discussing the ending of a mystery film is you end up talking about who the killer is, and that ruins the whole damned film! Though THE VERDICT is a trifle that only some crazed fan like me would ever want to watch, LAST OF SHEILA is a classic that may be remade, so you might want to watch that without know who the killer is. So - stop reading now and watch it.
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Okay, I’m going to give away who the killers are in both films. You have been warned.
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One of those film school/new screenwriter cliches along with “it was all a dream” is “the cop chasing the killer... who discovers he’s the killer” - and I frequently get that question: can the hero also be the villain? Aside from being confusing as all heck, what happens in those scenes where the hero and villain fight each other? Does the guy just punch himself? This is one of those ideas that new writers think is clever, but is almost impossible to make work on film. Sure, there’s FIGHT CLUB, but you’ll note that the character is split in two, so we have both Tyler Durden *and* Ed Norton’s character so that they can physically fight each other and argue and have dramatic scenes together... up until that twist end. And if the hero is the villain and he knows it - one side of his nature battling with the other side - the conflict ends up being entirely internal, and we can’t see it... unless we also split it as in JEKYLL AND HYDE. No matter what, we need to find some way to make the hero and the villain, the protagonist and antagonist, into two different people who can battle it out on screen (where we can see the battle).
This has nothing to do with “bad guy leads” - which is perfectly acceptable. Lots of movies have protagonists who are not nice people at all... like SCARFACE and those GODFATHER movies and my favorite film POINT BLANK. You can write a script about people who break the law or kill people or whatever. Not a problem.
But both THE VERDICT and LAST OF SHEILA have a workable version of the “cop chasing the killer... and the twist end is the cop is the killer”. Here’s how they work, in the event you want to do something like this...
The big problem with this sort of twist is that the audience identifies with the protagonist - they become the protagonist for the film - so when the protagonist reveals that they are not at all who you thought they were, the audience feels betrayed and hates your film. How both films get around this is by having a pair of lead characters - that Holmes and Watson thing - so that when one is revealed as being the bad guy, we are still able to identify with the other one... and the betrayal we feel is the same betrayal that other character feels, which intensifies our identification with them. In both cases it’s the genius Holmes-like character who is revealed to be the killer and the Watson-like character (who is easier for us to identify with) who figures it out at the end.
In LAST OF SHEILA, Richard Benjamin’s screenwriter is the Holmes-like character who figures it all out with the help of James Mason’s director... But Mason has one problem with Benjamin’s explanation and is playing around with forensic evidence and can’t get one piece to match... and realizes that the only other way it adds up is if Benjamin is the killer. So we have *partner* detectives for the entire film, and at the end the story passes the lead from the partners to *Mason*, so that we are identifying with him when it’s revealed that Benjamin is the killer.
In THE VERDICT, Sydney Greenstreet is the Holmes-like character who solves the crime with the help of Peter Lorre - who oddly enough is our main identification character. In one scene, we stick with Lorre as he pokes around for clues while Greenstreet is off screen. Again, they are partners until the end, where the audience splits off to follow Lorre as he finds those clues that lead to Greenstreet... and reveals him as the killer. So neither film betrays the audience, because they use partners.
The other thing both films have is a strong antagonist (who is not the killer). That gives the team someone to fight against, so that we can have physical struggle and dramatic scenes along the way. Conflict we can see. In LAST OF SHEILA, Coburn’s character is a complete jerk - and his cruelty lingers in scenes where he’s not on the screen. Because his cruel game is what leads to the murder, he is a great antagonist before the murder... and after. In THE VERDICT, Coulouris is such a back-stabbing evil politico, you *want* the partners to find the killer just to show him up. Every time they find a clue, Coulouris is there to battle them and threaten to jail them and throw his weight around. Because neither Lorre nor Mason can have a conflict with the actual killer during the story, we need an adversary to battle... and that means some antagonist who is not the killer. Coburn and Coulouris fit this perfectly. They are the antagonist until the very end of the movie where the killers are revealed.
So the three keys to “detective is the killer” plots are:
1) Partners, with the Watson character as our identification and the Holmes character as the killer.
2) A strong antagonist who is not the killer, but who the team can tangle with throughout the story giving us physical and dramatic conflict.
3) Killer revealed at the very end, after the baton has been passed to the Watson character.
Then, all you need is a story as clever as THE LAST OF SHEILA where the audience can play along and follow the clues...
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Watering Your Plants - and The Rule Of Three.
Yesterday's Dinner: Leftover lunch - Chicken Caesar Salad from my biz lunch at Sherman Oaks Galleria.
Pages: This blog entry and some poking around on one of the assignments.
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