Many of the memories of summers from my childhood are of playing the board game Clue with my grandmother at the picnic table on the back patio of her house. The set was the 1963 edition, with a mid-century modern design which influenced my tastes more than I would think possible. Thinking back, I can still taste pop straight from the glass bottle or from a metal cup. I can smell the thick air of a humid morning. I can even recall the smell when you lifted the lid off the game’s box.
It is still my favorite board game, though I haven’t played it in years. I remember being quite excited when the movie adaptation was released in 1985. I was the right age for this movie that really should have been rated PG-13. Though I haven’t seen it in quite some time, I was curious as to whether it was still as funny as I recall it being back then.
I was pleased it is still largely funny, though not as much as I suspect I used to find it. Watching it today, I realize how much love I once felt towards this picture predicted my later interest in screwball comedy. There is a great deal of running around, especially up and down the great hall of this mansion on the requisite dark and stormy night. Admittedly, just people running around and flailing isn’t very funny on its own. I shouldn’t be so surprised to see John Landis was one of the screenwriters for this, as so many of his movies incorrectly assume endless car crashes are hilarious in and of themselves.
For those who have somehow remained ignorant of either the movie, the game or both all this time, the central conceit is trying to determine which suspect killed one Mr. Boddy. The game involves going around one floor of a mansion and making guesses as to who you believe to be the suspect, the weapon used and the room in which the murder happened. It is not really a detective game, so much as a simple process of elimination. I may disagree with Daniel Craig in Glass Onion when he kept saying Clue is such a terrible game but it is, indeed, a rather simplistic affair.
Also in both, the main character go by aliases which are a color. Well, there is one that is not any one color and that is Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan). We also have Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn), Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd), Mr. Green (Michael McKean), Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull) and Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren). What’s odd is most of them do no dress in the same color as their names. Kahn’s Mrs. White is even in black, though that does make a bit more sense when we discover later she is a bit of a black widow, leaving behind five dead husbands.
Most of these characters have not met before, but they are united in that they are all being blackmailed. And they will meet their blackmailer tonight, that being Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving). Obviously, he won’t be in the picture for very long. The actual organizer of this confrontation is the butler Wadsworth, a name character played by Tim Curry. Other new characters include Coleen Camp as French maid Yvette and Kellye Nakahara as a cook who does not have a single word of dialogue, to the best I can recall.
The characters are being blackmailed for a variety of reasons, but each person has ties to the government. That this takes place at the height of the McCarthy anti-American hearings is telling. I found it amusing one character is being blackmailed is for a reason that most appalls the others, and that is somebody’s wife having friends who are Socialists. McKean is a bit of an outlier, as he is the only one paying to prevent the revelation of being a homosexual, which leads to all manner of humor which hasn’t dated well. I will concede that was part and parcel with 80’s comedies, and a different element also firmly dates it to that era, that being what was served for dinner later revealed to be monkey’s brains. Just from this, and the prior year’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, one might think this was a popular foodstuff of the time.
And there is also a great deal of innuendo and arch sexual humor. Kahn gets the lion’s share of the best lines in that vein, bon mots such as “Life after death is as improbable as sex after marriage”. Another insight into marriage is courtesy of this exchange between Curry and Kahn: “Your first husband also disappeared” “That was his job. He was an illusionist”. “But he never reappeared!” “He wasn’t a very good illusionist…”
The humor, however, largely concerns death more than sex, especially as the body count increases with the addition of several surprise characters. Eventually, the main characters don’t even react with the discovery of each additional body. Even early on, there are exchanges like this one between Brennan and Mull after he checks the study: “Everything alright?” “Yep. Two corpses. Everything’s fine.” A solid recurring joke is McKean seemingly always being the person right there to catch a corpse falling out of a closet, with him yelling “Well, I didn’t kill [him/her]!” Similarly, I laughed hard at a bit where Brennan faints and Curry tries to catch her but she slides right through his arms.
But more than sex or death, most of the jokes are about pretty much nothing at all, and there is too much throwaway material. One of the first recurring gags in the runtime has Curry getting dog shit on a shoe and then each additional person he talks with stops to check their own shoes. It wasn’t funny the first time, and each additional iteration makes it even less so.
There are attempts at wit which doubtlessly read better on paper than they play out on the screen. Consider Lloyd’s explanation that he works for the United Nations Organization, but in the World Health Organization branch. The way he says it, he explains he works for “you know who”.
The main cast all fare well, even if I felt they were more often acting “at” each other instead of “with”. Curry, in particular, excels in a role like this where he can essentially be a live-action cartoon. One of the weirdest, and most fleeting, appearance is Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s as a singing telegram. What happens to her is still my favorite gag in the picture. Camp, in her French maid outfit and reedeekyouluss French accent, has a thankless role, though many teenage boys of the time such as myself were thankful for her appearance.
One curious aspect of the movie is the layout of the main floor is very true to that of the game board. That includes the secret passageways, which go from one room to another situated diagonally opposite from each other. That doesn’t seem to make much sense, especially for rooms on the main floor of the house. I was curious how people traversing those passageways avoided all those windows and exterior doors.
Something novel for which the movie is famous (or, for some, infamous) is the multiple endings. In its original theatrical run, you didn’t know which ending you would see, unless the theatre actually announced which one was on their print, whether it be “A”, “B” or “C”. What is unfortunate is only one of those has a surreal improvised moment from Kahn which is baffling and deeply funny. I remember calling theatres at the time to try to see a different ending that the one I had seen and the person on the end of the line not only told me which one it was by its letter, but also casually spilt who was the murderer in it. All three are presented in order today, with the first two dismissed as only possibilities and the last being the real ending.
Clue was, and still is, not entirely successful. Like its board game inspiration, it is no way a real mystery; after all, you couldn’t have three completely different endings if the material wasn’t so flimsy as to have any number of possible conclusions. Like Murder by Death, it works best as a comedy and parody of the “closed circle” mystery genre popularized by Agatha Christie.
Funny how I can recall some critical outrage at the time of Clue’s original release over a game being turned into a movie. Since then, we have had films inspired by Battleship and Ouija, as well as countless adaptations of video games. More than that, we’ve had movies inspired by toys, culminating in the wildly popular and critically lauded Barbie. I wonder how many critics loved that picture were the same ones who also nearly had an aneurysm over Clue back in the day.
Dir: Johnathan Lynn
Staring Eileen Brennan, Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Leslie Ann Warren
Watched on blu-ray