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THE LAST OF SHEILA 1973
“Just goes to show what can be accomplished when a bunch of closeted gay men put their heads together!” Overheard following a screening of The Last of Sheila
In 1973 Stephen Sondheim, Anthony Perkins, and Herbert Ross - three closeted gay men in show business who knew a thing or two about keeping secrets - collaborated on The Last of Sheila, an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery with a touch of All About Eve vitriol set aboard a luxury yacht on the French Riviera. The Last of Sheila came about after Herbert Ross, one-time choreographer (Funny Girl) turned director/producer (The Owl and the Pussycat, The Turning Point), persuaded composer Stephen Sondheim (Company, Follies) to channel his extracurricular passion for inventing elaborate games and puzzles into a movie project. To that end, Sondheim, who at the time was working on the Broadway musical A Little Night Music , sought the help of friend and frequent game collaborator Anthony Perkins (then filming Play It as It Lays ) and the two devised a brain-teasing murder mystery thrilling enough to be entertaining and intricate enough so that audiences can play along with the characters in the film. An early first-draft from these two first-time screenwriters had the mystery take place over the course of a snowbound weekend in Long Island between business associates. But at Ross’ suggestion, the locale was changed to the more photogenic south of France, and the game-playing participants changed to a glamorous, in-joke cross section of Hollywood movie industry types.
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James Coburn as sharkish movie producer Clinton Green
Joan Hackett as heiress and Hollywood outsider Lee Parkman
Richard Benjamin as floundering screenwriter Tom Parkman
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Raquel Welch as glamorous movie star Alice Wood
Ian McShane as Anthony Wood, Alice's ambitious manager husband
Dyan Cannon as pushy talent agent, Christine
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James Mason as once-famous director Philip Dexter
A year after his gossip-columnist wife Sheila Green (Yvonne Romain) was killed in a hit and run accident near their Bel-Air home, movie producer Clinton Green (Coburn) invites six friends – five of whom were guests at his house that fateful night – to spend a week aboard his yacht (The Sheila) in the Rivera. A gathering that promises to be part vacation, part memorial, and part career-carrot dangled under the noses of a gaggle of show business opportunists willing to subject themselves to week of sadistic game-playing in hopes of being offered a job on Clinton’s planned film about the life of his late, not-exactly-lamented wife. A film to be titled, “The Last of Sheila.” This being a murder mystery, the murder half gets under way when, in the course of playing an elaborate, subtly cruel, detective/gossip game in which each player is assigned a gossipy secret the others must discover first, one of the participants winds up dead. The mystery revolves around the true inspiration for Clinton's game - the public exposure of the identity of his wife's killer - and whether or not that person or persons is willing to go to even greater lengths to keep their secret a secret. The stage has been successfully set (an isolated group of people seeking to discover who among them is a killer) for a rise in the body count, the typical-for-the-genre tearful revelations, several heated incriminations, and skeletons tumbling out of closets faster than you can say whodunit.
The ability to watch and rewatch The Last of Sheila on DVD has revealed it to be a much sharper and smarter film than it was credited with being when first released. Virtually every single frame and bit of character business reveals information pertaining to the overall mystery.
The Last of Sheila is a cinema rarity: a real corker of a murder mystery which plays fair with the viewer and doesn’t tip its hand in the first five minutes. It’s a nesting-doll of a murder mystery in which characters who initially enter into a game just for the fun of it, must eventually draw upon similar gamesmanship wiles to unearth the answers behind what turns out to be an actual murder mystery. A mystery which, in itself, is one we in the audience are invited to participate in solving (Sondheim and Perkins are our literal “Clintons”…peppering the film with visual and verbal clues which, should we be swift enough to pick up on, lead us to the solution to the mystery).
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And if, as many critics cited at the time, The Last of Sheila lacks the humanity necessary to make this murder mystery scarcely much more than a fun intellectual exercise (the common critical complaint was that the characters are all so despicable, you don’t give a hoot about trying to solve the mystery because you couldn’t care less whodunit or who it’s about to be done to); the passing of time and its availability on DVD has been kind to The Last of Sheila experience. And by that I mean, not only is it a kick to see folks like Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, and Raquel Welch all in the same film, but the characters and their deep, dark secrets seem almost quaint when compared to celebrities get away with these days (and happily tweet about). Most significantly though, the ability to rewind, rewatch, and reexamine The Last of Sheila, a film about whose mystery critic Rex Reed wrote, “…requires a postgraduate degree in hieroglyphics to figure out,” has made watching it a considerably less frustrating experience than it was back in 1973.
Let the Games Begin The original boat sank before filming. Original cinematographer Ernest Day (A Clockwork Orange) was fired after a week. Joan Hackett refused to say certain lines and was nearly replaced by Lee Remick. Arab terrorist group, Black September, threatened to blow up the set. James Mason couldn't stand Raquel Welch. Welch ruffled the feathers of costume designer Joel Schumacher (later the director Batman & Robin) by arriving with her entire wardrobe already designed and fitted by boyfriend, Ron Talsky. Welch (my, her name does keep popping up, doesn't it?) temporarily halted production when she walked off the film threatening to sue director Herbert Ross for assault and battery.
The Last of Sheila was made in the 70s, so it almost goes without saying that a post-Watergate cynicism and asserted preoccupation with exposing the ugly side of the lives of the Rich & Famous runs like an undercurrent throughout the film . Hollywood is never at its most naïve than when it thinks it has to ratchet up the heartlessness in an attempt to dramatize for us plebeians what a phony, anything-for-a-buck business it is. The joke of course has always been that only Hollywood thinks its celluloid soul and cash register heart are well-kept secrets. Most of us over the age of ten grasped long ago what an assembly line of falseness the movie industry is, and after years of “seedy underbelly” exposés (S.O.B., The Day of the Locust, Burn Hollywood Burn , The Bad & the Beautiful, Sunset Blvd., The Player, Two Weeks in Another Town, A Star is Born , The Oscar, etc.) I’m STILL waiting for a film to really capture just how callous and venal it can be…something perhaps possible only if the movie is conceived as a horror/porn film with traces of science fiction.
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The Last of Sheila Gossip columnist Sheila Green (Yvonne Romain) moments before she, as Christine so tactfully puts it "...got bounced though the hedges."
The busy schedules of Sondheim and Perkins prevented the two from having many opportunities to actually write the script while in the same room, thus the bulk of The Last of Sheila was done through phone calls and courier (Perkins has said only two scenes were written while both were in the same room at the same time), Sondheim handling the particulars of the game (natch), Perkins working hard to infuse Stephen’s academic brain puzzler with scare elements and Hollywood insider atmosphere. The result, while entertaining, sometimes feels as choppy and disjointed as the process of its creation. The Last of Sheila, is the result of the combined efforts of a composer not exactly known for his warmth; a tortured, somewhat embittered actor whose promising leading-man career was derailed and forever haunted by the spectre of Psycho’s Norman Bates; and a famously grumpy director whose idiosyncratic relationship with his actors rivals that of Otto Preminger. With nary a sympathetic character in sight, The Last of Sheila is a unified cold front of a movie desperately in need of a few genre chills and perhaps some script tweaking to help raise the modest level of hightoned bitchery to a level of wit and bite worthy of the intellectual wizardry of Sondheim’s puzzle.
Stephen Who? With A Little Night Music opening on Broadway in February, a Newsweek Magazine cover story in April, and a June release set for The Last of Sheila; 1973 marked the beginning of Stephen Sondheim's emergence as a household name. (Center) Perkins and Sondheim on the Cannes set of The Last of Sheila.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM To have Joan Hackett, that darling of idiosyncratic vulnerability, in the same film with the magnificent Raquel Welch, a startlingly uncraggy and boyishly cute Ian McShane, and the comically raucous Dyan Cannon, is quite a treat. But the real star of The Last of Sheila is its twisty murder mystery plot and the cunning “game” motif which runs throughout the film. From the start, an atmosphere of narrative disequilibrium permeates every scene. All the characters are such phonies with ulterior motives behind everything word and action, it’s clear any number of games are already well underway long before Clinton bullies everyone into participating in what he calls “The Shelia
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Green Memorial Gossip Game.” Once the real game does begin, it becomes harder and harder to know who to believe, who to trust, or who’s reality you're seeing.
Elaborate Clues Are Part of the Game
And if, in the end, the frequent scenes of lengthy exposition and reenactments necessitated by the complexity of the puzzle have the effect of leaving scant room for fleshed-out performances or dimensional characterizations (in Craig Zadan's book, Sondheim & Co., Perkins conceded to he and Sondheim "writing too much" and having to excise some 100 pages of the script before filming); one at least gets to console oneself with the not-unpleasant fact that The Last of Sheila is a fun, difficult-to-solve mystery that respects the viewer’s intelligence and rewards attentiveness. PERFORMANCES It’s unlikely anyone seeing this now 42-year-old film today knows or even cares that the characters in The Last of Sheila are based on and cobbled together from real-life Hollywood notables (equally unlikely is that anyone could identify them). But at the time of its release, the whole “Who is that supposed to be?” element was just one more of the many games The Last of Sheila set before the viewer. Of those rumored, Orson One of what I can only assume was a series of The Last of Sheila character promotional pinback buttons Welles was said to have inspired James Mason’s failed director character (even the casting of Mason, Lolita's memorable Humbert Humbert, a mystery clue). Richard Benjamin was Anthony Perkins' surrogate, and the sex-symbol and pushy husband portrayed by Welch and McShane were presumed by many to be Ann-Margret and Roger Smith. Although more popular opinion favored the filmmakers somehow getting Welch to agree to play herself (and then-husband Patrick Curtis), the character’s oddly unglamorous name (Alice “Wood”) being a sly allusion to the writers' opinion of Welch’s acting ability. However, it was no secret that Dyan Cannon was playing super-agent Sue Mengers (Bette Midler portrayed Mengers in a one-woman show on Broadway in 2013), as the actress’s lively impersonation was a major point of publicity at a time when Mengers ruled Hollywood with her client list of Barbra Streisand, Anthony
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Perkins, Richard Benjamin, Ryan O’Neal, Dyan Cannon, Faye Dunaway, et al.
Any movie that affords the opportunity to hear Dyan Cannon laugh is a worthwhile endeavor
Like pawns in a chess game, the somewhat overqualified cast of The Last of Sheila are there chiefly to be in service to the riddle of a plot, the minimal requirements of their roles rarely rising above TV-movie competency. So even if few are offered opportunities to really shine (Dyan Cannon has the best lines and the most to work with) all are in fine form and The Last of Sheila offers up an attractive gathering of some of the most familiar screen faces of the 70s. My particular favorites are James Coburn and Dyan Cannon, with the always-terrific Joan Hackett giving the film a much-needed dose of humanity. (With this film, The Group, Five Desperate Women, and The Class of ’63, Hackett must be the queen of reunion-themed movies).
Hunting Clues In An Abandoned Monastery
THE STUFF OF FANTASY I was 15-years-old when I first saw The Last of Sheila, dragging my family to see it the first week it opened (smug in my film/theater geek certainty that I alone among my high school peers knew who Stephen Sondheim was). I recall being very taken with the film as a whole, this being the first time I ever saw the traditional Agatha Christie drawing room mystery setup played out in anything resembling a contemporary setting. I’m not sure how audiences respond to it today, but in 1973, the mystery plot worked especially well because, outside of James Coburn, no one else in the cast had ever been typed as a villain. What with the Riviera setting and Hollywood types featured, it all seemed very glamorous and sophisticated to my adolescent eyes, the only dissonant chord being how old-fashioned all the name-dropping seemed. In the 70s Hollywood of Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty and Ali MacGraw, chummy references in the script to Steve & Edie, Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, and Sandra Dee seemed very Old World and out of touch. Oh, and The Last of Sheila introduced me to Bette Midler. She sings “Friends” over the film's closing credits and I so
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loved the song, I immediately went out and bought The Divine Miss M album. I've been a fan ever since.
Christine tries to convince Anthony that two heads are better than one
THE STUFF OF DREAMS As much as I loved The Last of Sheila, poor advance press (it opened out of competition at Cannes to disappointing word of mouth), mixed reviews (claims of it being indifferently directed and aloof were outdistanced by critics throwing up their hands saying the whole thing was just too damned confusing!), and perhaps the overall sourness of the film's tone, kept it from being a hit. It disappeared from theaters rather rapidly and for years you could mention the title and nobody would lay claim to having heard of it, let alone seen it. Now available on DVD,The Last of Sheila has developed quite a cult following. Worth checking out if you've never seen it before, worth revisiting to discover all the giveaway clues you missed the first time out.
Friends?
A fun bonus on the DVD is the commentary track provided by Welch, Cannon, and Benjamin. Cannon and Benjamin are obviously watching the film together and having a blast, while Welch (who always comes across more relaxed and funny on the commentary tracks for her films than she does in the films themselves) recorded hers separately. Little in the way of inside information is imparted - 42 yeas is a LONG time - but in its place is a nostalgia among the actors which appears to have erased memories of the troubled, over-schedule and over-budget shoot, replacing them with diplomacy (Cannon alludes to a person causing a long delay because they were dissatisfied with their outfit...one can't help thinking of Ms. Welch) and fond recollections of the experience. Everyone cops to having found the complex script very hard to follow during filming, and amusingly, Dyan Cannon (who had to gain weight for the role) can't seem to get over how fat she looks, while Raquel Welch laments that she herself looks too thin. All the while Cannon and Benjamin make references to Perkins and Sondheim in such a manner as to suggest perhaps they were a couple for a time.
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I certainly hope so. I'm sure that both gentlemen would be pleased if told their sole screenwriting collaboration still had a few gossipy secrets to impart.
Games People Play
THE AUTOGRAPH FILES
Ian McShane - 1980
Copyright Š Ken Anderson
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About Ken Anderson LA-based writer and lifelong film enthusiast. You can read more of his essays on films of the ’60s & ‘70s at Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For
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