Hollywood producer Clinton Greene gathers a group of friends aboard his boat, the Sheila, for a week of fun and games.
Clinton’s wife Sheila was killed under mysterious circumstances, and as the games proceed, it becomes clear that they are all tied to the mystery of her death.
When the games turn deadly, solving that mystery becomes more urgent for Clinton’s guests.
Written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, and directed by Herbert Ross, The Last of Sheila is a deliciously caustic murder mystery.
Rian Johnson paid tribute to this movie with Glass Onion (which also takes place in the Mediterranean, is centred around a wealthy benefactor hosting people who are indebted to him, and features a cameo from the film’s co-writer Sondheim).
Hopefully these tips of the hat will bring a new audience to this picture.
Featuring a cast of Hollywood veterans (Jameses Coburn and Mason) and fresh faces (Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon and Raquel Welch), the movie plays like a parody of those all-star ensemble pictures, where every character is a variation of their established personae, only stripped of lustre and run to seed.
The film even feels like a metaphor for the Hollywood studio system as it creaked into the seventies, with its dark underbelly (abuse, corruption, blacklisting) exposed.
It is hard not to read the movie as queer-coded, but that implies subtlety. Everyone is hiding their true selves. Masculine-feminine binaries are treated as modes of performance, while lust and power underplay every sexual interaction.
There is no genuine love inderpinning the supposed group of friends - everyone is here because they need something from each other.
If that all sounds a bit bleak, that is a matter of perspective. The movie’s savagery is laugh-out-loud funny.
Everyone is spouting catty, cutting one-liners, or exposing themselves as hypocrites. The final suspense sequence is punctuated by a brilliant moment of surrealism (‘I had no gloves’).
While Coburn and Mason are on form, it is Dyan Cannon who walks away with every scene she is in - as the superficial agent Christine, she is the movie as a person: out for themself and divorced from reality.
The movie balances its wit with a firm sense of tension, making arresting use of fish-eye lens to denote the killer’s perspective.
The Mediterranean locations are by turns gorgeous and disturbing - the interior of the monastery where a key sequence takes place is a highlight, a decayed, mordant backdrop to the characters’ spiritual bankruptcy.
The finale is suitably cynical: the mystery is solved but there is no catharsis or righting of wrongs, only an armistice - blackmail and mutual greed win out.
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