If you haven't seen MURDER BY DEATH (1976)
I love this movie. It's never hysterically funny to the point where the tears are running down your face, but it's always dryly amusing. The dialogue is packed with good quotes ("I'm the greatest! I'm Number One!" "To me, you look more like Number Two, know what I mean?") and there are dozens of nostalgic touches referring to five great fictional detectives (What?? No Nero Wolfe?) and the rules of their world. It's Neil Simon's slyest screenplay, if you ask me.
An eccentric millionaire recluse named Lionel Twain (Truman Capote) lives in a mansion absolutely crammed with as many bizarre death traps, hidden panels, rotating rooms, stuff moose heads with eyes removed so you can peek out, etc. He instructs his blind butler Bensonmum (Alec Guiness, never better) to send out invitations to the world's finest detectives for a night of dinner and a murder to solve. As the investigators arrive, the gags and wordplay pile up, the death traps are sprung, everyone's hidden motives are revealed and we get to see just what it is that has so enraged Twain. ("You tricked and fooled your readers for years. You tortured us all with surprise endings that made no sense. You've introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before! You withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it.")
There aren't movies today with a cast like this. Aside from Truman Capote and Alec Guiness, we are treated to:
Peter Sellers as Sidney Wang (Charlie Chan), with his adopted Japanese son. Try and cast a white actor with eye makeup and false buck teeth as a Chinese man today and see how fast you get boycotted. Wang of course spouts his twisted version of Chan aphorisms ("This conversation like televsion on honeymoon.. unnnecessary!") and is brutal in the way he treats his son.
Peter Falk as Sam Diamond (Sam Spade, with some Phiip Marlowe thrown in). The standout performance. Falk is an ace as he insults everyone in sight and brings his street level attitude to the rtitzy detective elite. He arrives with the much put-upon secretary Miss Skeffington (Eileen Brennan).
James Coco as Monsieur Perrier (Hercule Poirot), along with his hulking chauffeur. Not wild about the actor, the detective he's spoofing, or the performance in the film. Still, he's okay.. it's just that the others in the cast are so outstanding that he dims in comparison.
Elsa Lanchester as Jessica Marbles (Miss Marples), with her elderly nurse ("I have to take care of the poor dear now"). Lanchester is a howl, delivering her lines with enthusiasm and a slightly deranged twinkle in her eye.
David Niven and Maggie Smith as Mr and Mrs Nickie Charleston (Nick and Nora Charles). Very sly performances as the upper-class detectives who are appalled not only by their host's homicidal plan but by the gauche remarks of Sam Diamond. Niven's polite smiles under dreadful conditions are wonderful ("We were saved only by the fact that I'm frightfully well-bred.")
Finally, Nancy Walker in a small role as a deaf-mute cook adds a cute scene. A deaf-mute cook and a blind butler, oh dear, things are bound to go wrong in the kitchen.
What else? Well, as if all this wasn't enough, the opening credits roll to a sprightly theme by Dave Grusin, as we see close-ups of cardboard caricatures of the cast... drawn by the great Charles Addams. That's it, I'm sold.
Dir: Robert Moore