Murder By Death

Quite a fair bit of Neil Simon's work has been turned into Hollywood movies, although it should be added that he wrote several screenplays directly for the screen. One of the latter, as far as I can tell, is the movie Murder by Death, which has been sitting on my DVR for several months now.

The movie starts off with an unseen hand signing the name Lionel Twain (when we eventually see Lionel, he's played by Truman Capote) to a bunch of invitations. These go out to, in order:

Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith respctively), and Pet Terrier in New York;
Inspector Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers), in Catalina;
Monsieur Milo Perrier (James Coco), Brussels;
Mr. Sam Diamond (peter Falk), San Francisco; and
Miss Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester), Sussex, England.

Considering the names of these characters, and the title of the movie, it doesn't take much to figure out that this is going to be a spoof of the detective story/movie genre. Lionel then calls in his bulter Jamessir Bensonmum (Alec Guinness), who is blind, to stamp and deliver the letters. Although one of the jokes is that his stamps miss the letters, the characters all get their invitations, as the next scenes show the various characters trying to make their way to the house. Everybody comes more or less in pairs, as the Charlestons come togther; Wang comes with adopted #3 son Willie (Richard Narita); Milo has a chauffeur Marcel (James Cromwell); Diamond has his secretary Tess (Eileen Brennan); and Miss Marbles has an exceedingly elderly nurse, Miss Withers (Estelle Winwood).

They all get to the house in the thick fog, where they've ostensibly been invited for dinner cooked by a mute maid/cook (Nancy Walker). Of course, once again considering the title, we can guess that's not the real reason Twain invited everybody. Indeed, at dinner he tells them that he knows they're supposedly great detectives, but he's the greatest criminologist of them all. He's going to prove it by there being a murder committed at the house that they will be unable to solve because the mystery behind the murder is so diabolical that only a real mastermind can solve it And if any of them can, they'll win a million bucks. Yeah right.

But wouldn't you know it, the great detectives of the world eventually find a dead body, and one that certainly looks like it's been murdered. And they're in a stereotypically old dark house, so it may threaten them if they split up. Then again, it's not as if they're going to be able to solve it just sitting there together. And there's that big money for solving it.

To make things more complicated, when each of the pairs go to their bedrooms for the night, each of them finds they're also the target of a murder attempt in a way that's as stereotypical but also cinematic as the old dark house. Eventually each of them comes up with their own theory on whodunit and why, but who is right?

Murder by Death is another of those movies where it's very easy to see why everybody involved with it would want to make it. The idea of spoofing all of these literary/cinematic detectives is appealing. Add in the comic writing of Neil Simon, and there's a lot that most people are going to find hilarious.

To me, I have to admit there was a bit of an air of trying just a little too hard. Not that Murder by Death is a bad movie at all; it's more that at times the parody feels way too broad, and therefore not quite as funny as it ought to be. Still, most people are probably going to like this more than I did (and it's certainly not that I didn't like it), so it's absolutely worth watching.