The weekend I found out what "Clue!" (1985) was actually based on

There are a handful of films I can quote almost verbatim. Dodgeball, Princess Bride, the original Star Wars trilogy , and Clue!.

...so I was genuinely shocked when I found out that Clue! was not just based on the boardgame, but also heavily, heavily based on the 1976 film Murder by Death. When I watched the trailer I was immediately struck by 2 things;

1. That must be the same set
2. Holy crap look at that cast list...how have I not heard of this before?

So over the weekend I got the film onto the media server and we watched it last night.

Is it as good as Clue?

No, no it's not. But the influence is so immediately obvious, and through out the film I could draw a lot of parallels. It's more of a farce (without spoiling, it takes aim at various prolific detectives and sleuths who dominated the media at the time...some of whom I've never heard of (such as Nick and Nora Charles, who we had to look up after). Some were more immediately obvious, with Agatha Christies fleet of detectives taking a heavy lampooning. It's very much in the style of Not Another Teen Movie, and it does feel like the plot is sort of gently bolted on, and I can almost see the writer thinking of a scene, and then trying to justify it in retrospect. What it really highlights is how absolutely nailed down the plot and acting in Clue! really is...I maintain it's Tim Currys finest role, and I feel the constraints of the boardgame led to a much stronger overall storyline. Murder by Death leans into gadgets and gimmicks to fill plotholes and (in at least one case) poor staging, while Clue! is pretty watertight with regard to Chekovs Gun.

Some parts of the film have aged...badly. Peter Sellers is generally not that funny, and I doubt his role would be acceptable today (he plays a characterture of Charlie Chan, which leans hard on racial stereotypes). The pacing is slow in the early part, with much of the "interest" back-ended (again, I think Clue! fixes this, covering the reason for all the guests attendance fairly early on, while Murder by Death leaves this for the final third). The ending of Murder by Death starts well, but finishes weakly. By contract, Clue! (and I consider ending C, or "I'm going home to sleep with my wife", to be the canonical ending) keeps the pace and jokes right to the end.

Peter Falk is superb. He'd only done Colombo for the first time the year before, but plays a combination of him and Sam Spade with aplomb. David Niven is also excellent, and possibly with one of the best one-liners "...saved only by the fact that I am enormously well-bred".Alec Guiness is sort of wasted (and honestly, looks sorta weird without a beard).

I'm glad I've seen it, and have a better understanding of where Clue! came from. In a slightly bizarre way it makes me think of Neuromancer (the book). I read that after I'd been exposed to a number of works far more modern (namely Snow Crash), and initially felt the pacing was poor....however in retrospect I've simply seen more refined stories that have built on the model, and improved it. If I'd seen Murder by Death before Clue! I'd have found it hilarious, but now it gets categorised as a missing link fossil.