The Last of Sheila (1973)
I remember seeing this movie as a pre-teen and i remember really liking it. I may have seen it at a drive-in with the rest of my family back in 1973 or 1974. It played on TCM last fall or so and i used my pvr to record it. Well, i finally had a chance to see it this past weekend and it didn't disapoint.
What i also enjoyed was the discussion going on between the TCM host and a current movie director prior to the show's start. To my great surprise, the movie was co-written by actor Anthony Perkins who based the movie on his own experience with murder/mystery evenings he helped organize and participated in at the time. Perkins never wrote another screenplay afterwards which was strange considering how well received the movie was. It remains a favorite mystery/thriller movie among movie buffs today.
It stars several well-known actors of the 60's and 70's including James Coburn, Richard Benjamin, James Mason, Raquel Welch, Dyann Cannon, Joan Hacket & young Ian McShane. The characters were partly based on other well-known actors of the day among them participants in Perkins' murder-mystery soirees. The people they were based on included Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins himself. Raquel Welch had been told she and McShane would be playing the role of Ann Margaret and husband Roger Olson only to later learn that in fact she had been playing herself and one of her ex-husbands/boyfriends.
Raquel Welch was a big problem behind the scenes and eventually abandoned the production while accusing the director of assaulting her in her dressing room. But the actors backed the director and stated that Welch was an absolute bitch and diva on the set and impossible to work with. Welch eventually returned to the set to film her final scenes and only did so if accompanied with a bodyguard. Although the movie was successful and was popular among critics and movie goers, she has kept on proclaiming it as being a bad movie.
Do you know what the movie reminded me of? Murder on the Orient Express. Except that the background of the movie occurs on a yacht. To give you an idea of what the movie's plot line is about, it begins with movie producer Coburn's wife being run over and killed in a hit and run accident. Later, the eccentric Coburn invites 6 people on a mediterranean cruise in order to play a mystery game related to his now-deceased wife, who used to be a gossip columnist in Hollywood at the time of her death. These 6 people were all at his house party the night his wife was killed. Each of those 6 people are given a clue and we eventually realize that each clue describes a secret of each of the 6 participants, but the clues are given to different people instead and every night one of those clues is the key to that evening's game and it ends when it's discovered who is the person behind the clue. As the movie goes on, the game becomes deadly.
I highly recommend this movie and especially so if you like endings with a twist.