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 working in the entertainment business who knew a thing or two about keeping secrets—collaborated on The Last of Sheila; an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery (crossed with a touch of All About Eve vitriol) set aboard a luxury yacht on the French Riviera. 

The Last of Sheila came about after one-time choreographer Herbert Ross (Funny Girl) turned his talents to producing and directing (The Owl and the Pussycat, The Turning Point) and persuaded Broadway 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 could play along with the characters in the film.

An early first-draft from these two first-time screenwriters had the mystery take place between business associates over the course of a snow-bound weekend in Long Island, but at Ross’ suggestion the setting was switched to the more picturesque south of France, and the game-playing participants changed from button-down businessmen to a glamorous, in-joke cross-section of Hollywood movie industry types.

James Coburn as sharkish movie producer Clinton Green

Joan Hackett as heiress and Hollywood outsider Lee Parkman

Richard Benjamin as floundering screenwriter Tom Parkman

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

James Mason as once-famous director Philip Dexter

On the anniversary of the night 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 party guests at his home that fateful night—to spend a week aboard his yacht (The Sheila) on 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. Opportunists willing to subject themselves to a week of sadistic game-playing in hopes of being offered a job on the film Clinton is planning to make 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 underway when, in the course of playing an elaborate, subtly cruel, detective/gossip game in which each player is assigned a gossipy secret the others are in a race to 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. Thus, with a party of individuals gathered to an isolated setting for the purpose of unearthing who among them is a killer, the stage has been for the subsequent rise in the body count, the typical-for-the-genre tearful confessions, to to-be-expected 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 reveal information pertaining to the overall mystery.

The Last of Sheila is a cinema rarity: a real corker of a murder mystery that not only plays fair with the viewer, but isn't so rote and predictable that it tips its hand in the first five minutes. A nesting-doll kind of mystery in which assembled characters enticed into participating in a guessing game just for the fun of it, soon find themselves forced to employ equivalent stratagems of detection and gamesmanship to unearth the truth behind an actual murder. A clever murder mystery that we in the audience are invited to participate in solving. Sondheim and Perkins serve as our “Clinton Green”; peppering their film with visual and verbal clues which, should we be swift enough to pick up on, will guide us to the solution to the mystery.

And if, as many critics cited at the time, you find The Last of Sheila lacks the humanity necessary to make this "Agatha Christie on the Riviera" whodunit more than just an entertaining exercise in intellectual gymnastics (a 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); let it be known that time has been kind to The Last of Sheila.

And by that I mean, not only is it a kick to see popular '70s stars like Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, and Raquel Welch all in the same film, but the characters and their deep, dark secrets they're willing to kill to conceal are almost quaint when compared to the kind of scandals celebrities boastfully tweet about these days. Most significantly, the contemporary ability to rewind, rewatch and reexamine The Last of Sheila, a film about whose mystery critic Rex Reed observed “…requires a postgraduate degree in hieroglyphics to figure out,”  has made watching the film a considerably less frustrating experience now than it was back in 1973.

Let the Games Begin: Making The Last of Sheila was Murder
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 of dialogue and was nearly replaced by Lee Remick. The 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 of Batman & Robin) by arriving with her entire wardrobe already designed and fitted by her 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 practically 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 anyone over the age of 12 has a pretty clear-eyed grasp of how unprincipled an industry it is, and after years of “seedy underbelly” exposés like: 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. It would be thrilling (if sobering) to one day see a movie about Hollywood that confronts its own institutionalized, profit-driven practices of racism, sexism, nepotism, sexual abuse, cronyism, and boys club mentality. In the meantime, I guess we have to settle for "anything for a buck" serving as Hollywood's version of self-revelatory candor.

The Last of Sheila 
Gossip columnist Sheila Green (Yvonne Romain) moments before she
(as Christine so tactfully puts it) "...got bounced through the hedges." 

The busy work schedules of Sondheim and Perkins prevented the two from having many opportunities to physically work on the script together; thus the bulk of The Last of Sheila was done through phone calls and couriers. Sondheim devised the twists and details of Clinton's sadistic game, while Perkins worked to infuse the otherwise academic brain puzzler with suspense and a Hollywood insider atmosphere. The result, while entertaining, occasionally feels as choppy and disjointed as the process of its creation (Perkins claimed only two scenes in the entire film were written while both occupied the same room at the same time).

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 specter 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, for all its entertainment value, is a unified cold front of a movie desperately in need of a few genuine genre thrills and perhaps some script tweaking to assist in raising the dialogue's high-toned bitchery to a level of wit worthy of the wizardry of Sondheim’s quirky 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

The cast of the film is a real eye-catcher. To have Joan Hackett, that darling of idiosyncratic vulnerability, in the same film with the magnificently constructed Raquel Welch, a surprisingly uncraggy Ian McShane, and the comically raucous Dyan Cannon, is quite a treat. But the star of The Last of Sheila is its twisty murder mystery plot and the cunning “game” motif that runs throughout the film. From the start, an atmosphere of narrative disequilibrium permeates every scene. 

All the characters are such phonies harboring 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 Green Memorial Gossip Game.” Once the game gets underway, it becomes harder and harder to know who to believe, whom to trust, or who’s reality is pulling the narrative strings.  

Elaborate Clues Are Part of the Game

And if, in the end, the 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.

They Haven't Seen The Last of Sheila
Each of these numbered cast portraits served as a teaser ad countdown
appearing in newspapers seven days before the film opened 

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 Welles was said to have inspired James Mason’s failed director character (even the casting of Mason, Lolita's memorable Humbert Humbert, was a character clue to the mystery). 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 the more popular, meaner opinion was that the filmmakers somehow got Welch to agree to play herself and her then-husband, producer 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 Perkins, Richard Benjamin, Ryan O’Neal, Dyan Cannon, and Faye Dunaway.

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 onscreen 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 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 and frequently shown on TCM, 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 as 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 years 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 but think of Ms. Welch) and fond recollections of the experience.
Everyone admits to finding the complex script very hard to follow during filming. Amusingly, Dyan Cannon (who had to gain weight for the role) can't seem to stop commenting on how fat she thinks she looks, while Raquel Welch laments that she herself looks too thin. Throughout, Cannon and Benjamin make references to Perkins and Sondheim in such a manner as to suggest perhaps the two were a couple for a time.
I certainly hope so. I'm sure that both gentlemen would be pleased if they knew their sole screenwriting collaboration still had a few gossipy secrets to impart.

Games People Play

BONUS MATERIAL

A terrific publicity featurette about the making of The Last of Sheila featuring Stephen Sondheim & Tony Perkins, and behind-the-scenes footage of the filming

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Ian McShane - 1980

The Last of Shiela opened in Los Angeles on Wednesday, June 20th, 1973
 at the Pacific Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015