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.

Destiny's Passport

Another of the B movies that TCM ran in their spotlight to B movies back in the summer was Passport to Destiny. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

The movie was released in 1944, and the opening credits are superimposed over establishing shots of London, which pretty squarely puts the movie in World War II when the Nazis were trying to bomb London to oblivion. One morning on a bus, cleaning woman Ella Muggins (Elsa Lanchester) overhears a conversation about how the Nazis have just destroyed a long-time pub. Ella, who's a widow, talks about how she's survived so far thanks to her late husband (the photo used is Lanchester's real-life husband Charles Laughton), who served in India and brought back a "magic eye" charm. And then, while she's up in the attic storage, she actually finds the charm in an old trunk.

Not much later, there's another of the nightly bombing raids on London, and Ella gets caught in it. Except that she survives, because if she didn't there wouldn't be that much of a movie. She attributes her survival to the charm. In the bomb shelter in the Underground, she starts talking about the charm, and people have the idea to ask what would you do if you had a charmed life. This being the middle of World War II, one woman says that if she had such a charmed life, she'd go over to Germany and give Adolf Hitler what-for. Ella, naïve woman that she is, gets an idea....

It's only about one scene later that we see a boat that's about to leave London and join one of the convoys trying to cross the Atlantic, followed by a shot of Ella sneaking aboard the ship thinking it's going to Germany. When she's found out, the crew is none too happy, because female stowaways are decidedly bad luck. Sure enough, this being a B movie, it doesn't take more than one scene for the ship to get bombed and everyone to have to abandon ship. And wouldn't you know it, but charmed Ella is able to hide from the Germans while the rest of the crew become POWs.

So she decides to make her way to Berlin, posing as a deaf-mute so that nobody will figure out that the only language she knows is English and as such, is decidedly not German or even from one of the countries the Nazis conquered. She eventually stows away on a train bound for Berlin, getting away with it by pretending to be working on the train. The compartment where she is just happens to have as passengers two men who are both part of the resistance working against Hitler, so when he gets to Berlin she's going to be be able to find somebody who might be able to help her.

Her plan is to get to the Chancellery where Hitler's office should be, and get a job there with the intention of going into Hitler's office and killing him. Also working there is Lord Haw-Haw, although it seems as though his usefulness to the Nazis is coming to an end. All of the plot strands come together, but since this was made during the war, you have to think they can't really kill Hitler, can they?

It's easy to see why a movie like Passport to Destiny would go into production during the war, but it's got so many plot holes and other problems that the movie doesn't really succeed. And on top of that, Ella's play-dumb act gets increasingly annoying. So Passport to Destiny is a bit of an interesting curiosity from the war, but not a particularly good movie.

Ladies in Retirement

One of the new-to-me movies that I had the chance to record during 31 Days of Oscar back in April was Ladies in Retirement. Recently, I sat down to watch it and do a review of it here.

Ida Lupino plays Ellen Creed. She's a single woman in mid-1880s England who works for Leonora Fiske (Isobel Elsom). Fiske is a former actress who apparently could afford to retire fairly well, as she's got a nice house in a rural part of County Kent, and not just Ellen living with her but maid Lucy (Evelyn Keyes). However, things aren't going so well for Ellen as she gets a letter from London.

In that letter, a landlady informs Ellen about Ellen's two sisters, Emily (Elsa Lanchester) and Louisa (Edith Barrett). Both of them are apparently "dotty", more than the aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace but not quite as insane as the aunts' nephew who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt. In any case, Ellen seems to be the only one who can take care of her two sisters as they cause problems everywhere else they go and the landlady is threatening to call the police and have the sisters sent to an asylum.

Another problem for Ellen shows up, although she doesn't know about this one yet. A man from Gravesend not too far away shows up, and rather rudley asks Leonora if he could borrow £12. Tha man is Albert (Louis Hayward), who claims to be Ellen's nephew, which would be by a fourth, unseen sibling who must apparently be dead or else that sibling should be helping to take care of Emily and Louisa. But enough thinking of possible plot holes. Albert leaves before Ellen sees him, although he's going to come back later on and we learn that he's in much deeper financial difficulties and embezzled from the bank's till to get the money so the police are after him.

The police might be about to be after Ellen, too. Not because of the two sisters, at least not directly. Ellen asks Leonora if the two sisters can come to visit, Leonora not knowing about the sisters' mental state. Leonora would be thrilled to have more guests, at least until she finds out the truth about them and wants to be rid of them while Ellen is scheming to come up with a way to get them to stay on permanently.

Ellen's ultimate plan is to send everybody away from the house for a day and, while alone with Leonora, kill her and claim that Leonora sold the house to her. Of course, it's a scheme that wouldn't work in real life, and definitely isn't going to work here since the Production Code would never allow it. Oh, it does seem to work for a while, but Albert returns, romances Lucy, and together the two of them start snooping and guess the truth about Ellen. Not that Albert can do much about it since he's got his own legal problems, of coures.

Ladies in Retirement was originally a stage play, something which is fairly obvious considering how much of the movie is set inside the house. But director Charles Vidor does a good job of opening up the action, and plays aren't necessarily a bad thing, especially if they're not stagey. Unsurprisingly, Lupino gives a good performance, and the movie is mostly about her character. The ending may be a bit of a problem for some, but then they had to come up with something that would placate the Production Code office. (I couldn't find what differences there are between the movie and the play.) Definitely worth a watch.

If you're wondering why TCM was able to show Ladies in Retirement in 31 Days of Oscar, it's because the movie got an unsurprising nomination for its black-and-white art direction as well as a more surprising one for the score.