THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN 1969

If You Want It, Here It Is, Come and Get It. Mm...Mm...Mm...Mm

State of the World - 2022: The world’s richest men are eccentric billionaires who, proportionate to the degree to which their hoarded obscene wealth could ease human suffering, have fundamentally taken on the role of real-life supervillains.

State of Mind - 1969: Terry Southern’s anti-capitalist satire The Magic Christian – about an eccentric billionaire who spends his money orchestrating elaborate practical jokes exposing the avarice, bigotry, and hypocrisy of the over-privileged classes – is made into a major motion picture.

Peter Sellers as Sir Guy Grand

Ringo Starr as Youngman Grand

One of the nicer things I remember about the late-‘60s was its social and political idealism. From my pre-teen perspective, it felt like young adults all across the country were collectively waking up to the inequities and injustices of society and were serious in their commitment to the belief that change was possible. 

Capitalism, being what it is, was also doing some waking up at this time. In the form of noticing that the disposable income of this sizable demographic was being freely spent on goods and entertainments that reflected their values, supported and promoted their beliefs, and gave the appearance of being, if not exactly one of them, at least at one with them. 

Raquel Welch as Priestess of the Whip
Despite her prominence in the film's marketing, the striking Welch shows up ten minutes before the film is over for all of 30 seconds. Though marvelous-looking, she comes off much like she did in her cameo in the satiric Bedazzled (1967)...looking as though she doesn't quite get the joke.    

As usual, Hollywood…sometimes the trendsetter, often a step behind, but only rarely ever in pace with the times…found itself in the position of playing “catch-up” in trying to develop projects that appealed to this newly recognized audience. But the world was changing so fast that the crunch to meet the market demand for suitably “now” motion pictures only exposed Hollywood’s bloated, slow-moving studio system as ill-suited to compete with the immediacy (and, by extension, relevance) of inexpensively-made independent and underground films. 

Sheer law of averages accounted for the rare youth-market breakout success: e.g., The Graduate – 1967, Bonnie and Clyde -1967, Easy Rider – 1969, and Midnight Cowboy – 1970. But as the major studios were still a bunch of conservative white men well past the age of 30 trying to make a quick buck off of the liberal and diverse “Don’t trust anyone over 30” crowd; more often than not the haste to get “Where it’s at” movies into theaters before they became “Where it was” cultural artifacts, resulted in a glut of big-budget miscalculations like Skidoo (1968), Myra Breckinridge (1970), and Terry Southern's Candy (1968). 

Ewa Aulin & Ringo Starr in Candy (1967)
Counterculture icon Terry Southern (contributing screenwriter for Dr. Strangelove, Barbarella, Easy Rider, Casino Royale) wrote the sex satire Candy in 1958 with Mason Hoffenberg. Buck Henry adapted the script for the truly dire film version. 

Relying heavily on the most exploitable signifiers of youth-cult marketability—profanity, nudity, sex, & drugs—these blatantly pandering exercises in desperation were so arrogantly clueless in their lack of understanding of the very public whose dollars they so cynically courted that they came across as being almost hostile to young people. 

By all accounts, the film version of The Magic Christian started out as a sincere, well-intentioned ideological passion project spearheaded by Peter Sellers (who, in his 40s, had joined show business’ ever-growing ranks of over-age flower children and millionaire hippies). But the finished product wound up illustrating the Grand-ish point - “Nothing is so sacred that it can’t be corrupted by money” in ways not intended. 

Grand & Son
A man who has everything joins forces with a man who has nothing,
and together they set about to prove that "Everyone has their price."

Over the film’s opening credits, we’re introduced to Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers), the world’s richest man. Before the credits are over, the unmarried, childless billionaire meets and promptly adopts a homeless man (Ringo Starr), dubs him Youngman Grand, and makes the shaggy young derelict the heir to his fortune. Since the film begins mid-stride and hits the ground running, we never learn what prompts Grand’s impulsive want for offspring, nor what’s behind his mania for using his great wealth to take the piss out of the posh. But it’s certainly not out of the question for us to assume that he's perhaps insane, for it’s something of an anti-establishment movie tradition (a la, King of Hearts – 1966 and The Madwoman of Chaillot - 1969) to depict the lunatics and madmen in our world as the only sane people left. 

Laurence Harvey (in a bit originally intended for David Hemmings)
performs Hamlet's soliloquy as a striptease

The darkly comic “capitalism kills” satire of The Magic Christian was written by Texas-born Terry Southern in 1959, but the climate of counterculture rebellion that was America in the late-‘60s made his episodic evisceration of American excess feel more relevant than ever. At least in theory. 

Peter Sellers had expressed interest in making a movie of The Magic Christian as far back as 1964 while filming Dr. Strangelove (he’d hoped to get Stanley Kubrick to direct). Drawn to what he saw as the satire’s idealistic principles— "It illustrates to the public the truth about power, money, and corruption,” he intoned to a skeptical press— the recently spiritually and politically awakened actor acquired the rights, secured financing, and corralled a slew of celebrity friends to work for scale.

Richard Attenborough as the coach of the Oxford Rowing Team

But in taking four years and some 14 screenplay drafts to reach the screen, a movie idealistically espousing the hippie ethos (signaled by the film’s finale which finds Grand and Youngman choosing “A simpler way,” and opting for a life of vagrancy) felt as though it had arrived a bit late to the party. Close to the 1967 Summer of Love would have been great. During the global student protest year of 1968 perhaps better.

 But the out-and-out worst time for the release of a movie advocating the longhair generation as society’s saviors was in the wake of the two most defining moments signaling the end of the hippie era: the Manson Murders (August 1969) and the Altamont Festival killing (December 1969).

I can’t speak for the UK, but in post-Manson Family America, the notion of a put-on artist staging guerilla acts of protest against the rich to incite anarchy and chaos had lost a great deal of its subversive appeal.

Peter Sellers with friend and fellow Goon, Spike Milligan

Peter Sellers’ involvement assured The Magic Christian would be made, but it also turned Terry Southern’s very American satire into a very British one. Hiring friend and Casino Royale co-director Joseph McGrath to helm and Southern to adapt (with the too-many-cooks assist of Sellers, Magrath, and a pre-Monty Python John Cleese and Graham Chapman), The Magic Christian became (perhaps intentionally) a kind of filmed version of The Goon Show radio program that got Sellers his start in the ‘50s’.

British humor tends to be a little tough going for me anyway, especially when it's very male-centric and sophomoric (I was never a Monty Python fan). But my main complaint with the British setting is that from an American perspective, the targets of Guy's pranks are such obvious prigs and snobs that the satire feels toothless. 

Poking fun at a culture that appears (to us, anyway) to be more openly classist (Royalty, observance of historical traditions, accents denoting class distinctions) is quite different from poking fun at a country that pathologically waves the flag of its egalitarianism when in fact it's ragingly racist, wealth-worshipping, and classist as hell.

John Cleese as the Sotheby's director

Wilfred Hyde-White as Capt. Reginald K. Klaus

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I was 12 years old when I saw The Magic Christian in 1970. Then, funny to me meant: Mad Magazine, The Three Stooges, Bugs Bunny, and Laugh-In. Countless trips to the theater to see Casino Royale (1967) and The Party (1968) had cemented Peter Sellers as my #1 favorite comic actor. And, thanks to several years of involuntary exposure to the music and movies of The Beatles (thanks, sis), I was also a bonafide Beatles fan myself. So, of course, I thoroughly loved The Magic Christian. I thought it was hilarious. And my finding it so made me feel oh-so-hip and oh-so-sophisticated.

Christopher Lee
For those still in the dark, The Magic Christian is the name of an elite luxury liner
with an interior straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Being at that awkward tween-age—socially invisible, politically powerless, desperate to assert individuality—my inner anarchist delighted in the Bugs Bunny/Marx Brothers-style of “comedy of disruption.” As one critic put it, The Magic Christian was all about "...deflating the pompous, punishing the greedy, and discomfiting the complacent." So, in the adolescent spirit of being attracted to anything you’re certain your parents will disapprove of, I reveled in The Magic Christian’s raciness (bodybuilders in skimpy bikinis!); bad taste (the hunting party with heavy artillery); and ham-fisted satire (the Oxford/Cambridge race). It was an issue of Mad Magazine come to life.

The audacious notion of tossing money into a vat filled with blood, urine, and manure and then getting people to wade through it for the free cash would have a lot more satirical bite today if it didn't sound like something the GOP would actually propose to replace Social Security. 

I also imagine that some of the appeal The Magic Christian held for me was that Sir Guy Grand was like an adolescent boy’s wish-fulfillment fantasy of adulthood. The asexual Guy Grand has no interest in either women or men (nudity and sex are things to be giggled at); never has to answer to anyone, and is saddled with none of the pain-in-the-ass responsibilities of being a grown-up. He just gets to spend all of his time hanging out with his best buddy (adoption adding a new twist to BFF) playing games and pulling wise-ass pranks on authority figures. 

Yul Brynner & Roman Polanski

There are times when you've just gotta let an image speak for itself

"Ah, but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now." -  Bob Dylan

Revisiting The Magic Christian after a nearly 40-year gap was an experience by turns amusing, nostalgic, and bewildering. It was great seeing the movie looking so good on Blu-ray, and I especially got a kick out of the many cameo appearances and discovering what things about the film had stayed with me over the years. For example, it was gratifying to find that the pre-credits sequence (my favorite part of the film) was still as clever as I’d remembered it: a distinguished portrait of the Queen is revealed to be a British 10-pound note, after which the audience is encouraged to sing along to a follow-the-bouncing-ball stanza of the Paul McCarney composition (sung by Badfinger) “Come and Get It.” (How tragic is it that my favorite part of The Magic Christian takes place before the film proper even begins?)

Tangoing bodybuilders Lincoln Webb & Roy Scammell provoke and 
 tantalize the racist and homophobic passengers on The Magic Christian. 

What bewildered me was just how unfunny the film now seems to me. I wasn’t bored, I enjoyed myself, and the film kept my interest, and I still champion the overall idea of the film. But the experience of watching it was entirely laugh-free. Granted, so much of the film’s humor is reliant on shock and the element of surprise, so it can be said that my reaction is at least in part due to my being so familiar with the material.

But that doesn’t account for the benumbing effect of the wash-rinse-repeat satire cycle of the screenplay or the loose-moorings structure of the film itself. It's weird watching an entire film that has no real human behavior in it. At the start of the film, there's a series of crosscuts between the morning rituals of Sellers and Starr that juxtapose and contrast the lives of the haves and the have-nots. There's a sweetness to it that sets the stage for an anticipated humane political polemic that never materializes.

Leonard Frey as Ship's Physician Laurence Faggot (pronounced, Fa-goh)
The Magic Christian -- a movie "The Celluloid Closet" author Vito Russo called "A viciously homophobic film" --never met a gay joke it didn't like. Funny then how it never once addresses the comic or homoerotic implications of a middle-aged man adopting a young man he just met in the park.

Not helping matters is the inconsistent nature of Guy's pranks. The point he's trying to prove to Youngman grows murky as his stunts veer from harmless (turning Shakespeare's Hamlet into a burlesque) to mean-spirited (grossly overpaying a hot dog vendor and insisting on his change from a moving train).

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Bedazzled (1967)

I'm of the opinion that the truest screen interpretation of Terry Southern's Guy Grand is to be found in Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka (think about it...all he does is play tricks on the greedy and self-interested!). And for a good example of the kind of lively, in-the-spirit-of-mischief chemistry lacking in the pairing of Sellers and Starr, I really think Peter Cook and Dudley Moore hit paydirt in Bedazzled. 

PERFORMANCES

I’m gonna lead off by saying that I truly love the look Peter Sellers devised for Sir Guy Grand. Simultaneously dashing and screwball, it’s said that Sellers sought to approximate the look of a young Albert Schweitzer while portraying Grand as a kind of British Groucho Marx. He’s considerably more successful in the former than the latter. I think Sellers is far too inspired a comic actor to ever be uninteresting, so I can’t say I don’t enjoy him in The Magic Christian. But the screenplay doesn’t provide a character for Sellers to play, and he doesn’t appear particularly interested in supplying one on his own. So, outside of an accent and a whimsical swath of hair, his Guy Grand very nearly doesn’t exist.

But he's in good company with the charming but wholly superfluous Ringo Starr. In a role not in the book and written with him in mind (contrary to erroneous claims that John Lennon was first considered) I suspect the intention was to supply a little youth-identification for the audience while mining the silent, Chaplinesque quality Starr brought to his well-received solo bits in Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. And certainly, if you saw him in Candy, you know a Ringo Starr with no dialogue is the best possible course of action to take. But, like Sellers, he's not given a character to play and brings nothing to the part but a droopy mustache and Rita Tushingham eyes.

"Well, you know, Youngman, sometimes it's not enough merely to teach. One has to punish as well."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

At least one aspect of The Magic Christian has not changed a bit for me over the years. The soundtrack to this movie is terrific. I love the infectious "Come & Get It"--particularly the soaring strings instrumental arrangement that accompanies the closing credits. It gave me goosebumps the first time I heard it blaring through the speakers at the movie theater. 

But the song that really stands out as the one I most associate with the film is Thunderclap Newman's youth rebellion anthem "Something in the Air." I think it's brilliant. I heard it for the first time in The Magic Christian theatrical trailer and instantly fell in love. And I'm still crazy about it. One of my all-time favorite '60s songs. In 1973 the singing group Labelle covered it in a version that combined it with Gil Scott Heron's poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." You owe it to yourself to give it a listen...to use one of my favorite Magic Christian quotes: "It'll tighten your wig."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Clip from "The Magic Christian"  1969

What keeps The Magic Christian among my list of "tarnished favorites" is that, despite not feeling as strongly about it as I did when I was a kid, I tend to think of it as one of the last of the optimistic flower-children/hippie films. The Nixon era of disillusionment and cynicism was right on the horizon, and the idealism at the heart of The Magic Christian had already started to be replaced by the snark and smirk of movies like M.A.S.H. (1970).

In the ensuing decades, capitalism has done its job so well that today, social media is full of individuals just managing to get by financially who nevertheless seize every opportunity to be the white knights and front-line defenders of the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of our culture whenever a legitimate criticism is voiced regarding the morality of being grotesquely rich in a civilized society that tolerates hunger.

In such an atmosphere, it's impossible to completely dislike a movie that associates wallowing in money with wallowing in feces, blood, and urine.

A hippie at heart, Sir Guy Grand has the three-pointed star hood ornament

 of his Mercedes-Benz reconfigured as a peace symbol. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2022

THE LAST OF SHEILA 1973

“Just goes to show what can be accomplished when a bunch of closet cases 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 industry who knew a thing or two about secrets and how to keep them—collaborated on The Last of Sheila; an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery (crossed with a touch of All About Eve show-biz 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). The two devised a brain-teasing murder mystery that was thrilling enough to be entertaining and intricate enough for audiences to play along with the characters in the film.

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

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’s 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 Riviera. A gathering that promises to be part vacation, part memorial, and part career carrot dangled under the noses of a gaggle of desperate 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 part gets underway when, during the course of playing an elaborate, subtly cruel, detective/gossip game in which each player is assigned a gossipy secret that the others are in a race to be the first to discover, one of the participants is found dead. The mystery revolves around what turns out to be the true inspiration for Clinton's game—the public disclosure of the identity of his wife's killer. The thrills come from wondering what lengths the killer will go to in order to protect themselves.  

Thus, with a party of individuals gathered in an isolated setting for the purpose of unearthing who among them is a potential murderer, the stage has been set for the subsequent rise in the body count, the typical-for-the-genre tearful confessions, the 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 reveals 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 invites us, the audience, to participate in solving it. Sondheim and Perkins serve as our “Clinton Green,” peppering their film with visual and verbal clues that, if we are swift enough to pick up on, will guide us to the solution of the mystery at hand.

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 whose mystery critic Rex Reed observed “…requires a postgraduate degree in hieroglyphics to figure out,” has made watching it considerably less frustrating now than it was in 1973.

Let the Games Begin
Apparently, Making The Last of Sheila was Murder
The original boat sank before filming. 
The 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 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 15 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, homophobia, 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 tactfully puts it) "...got bounced through the hedges." 

The busy work schedules of Sondheim and Perkins prevented the two from having many opportunities to work on the script together in person; 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 that only two scenes in the entire film were written while both were in 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 film's cast 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 every 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 whose 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 that 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 widely presumed to be Ann-Margret and Roger Smith (though the more popular, meaner view 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”—is 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.

Clip from "The Last of Sheila" (1973)

Like pawns in a chess game, the somewhat overqualified cast of The Last of Sheila is there chiefly to serve the riddle of a plot, with 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, as this was the first time I had ever seen the traditional Agatha Christie drawing-room mystery setup played out in anything resembling a contemporary setting.

Christine tries to convince Anthony that two heads are better than one

I’m not sure how audiences respond to it today, but in 1973, the mystery plot worked especially well because, aside from James Coburn, no one else in the cast had ever been cast as a villain. With the Riviera setting and Hollywood types featured, it all seemed very glamorous and sophisticated to my adolescent eyes, the only discordant note being how old-fashioned all the on-screen 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 that I immediately went out and bought The Divine Miss M album. I've been a fan ever since.

The score for The Last of Sheila was composed by Billy Goldenberg (The Grasshopper, Reflections of Murder), but it was the song played over the end credits that left the impression. “Friends,” written by Buzzy Linhart and Mark Linhman, appears on Bette Midler’s 1972 debut album, “The Divine Miss M.”  

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

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015