I swear I didn't mean to rent two Peter Falk flicks in a row. Ironically, the point was to see something rather unlike the first. Certainly the genre is different, and Falk is no worse suited to comedy. I still knew this to be a gamble, partly because Neil Simon wrote it.
Eccentric millionaire Lionel Twain (Truman Capote, the only time he acted without narrating or playing himself) summons ten humans and a terrier, all famous detectives or their companions, to his secluded mansion for "dinner and a murder." There is no dead body when they arrive, but the atmosphere is deliberately creepy, and they narrowly evade several traps. The blind butler (Alec Guinness) notes his employer's macabre sense of humor but appears unaware of any actual danger. At dinner, Twain announces that someone will be murdered in an hour and that the victim and culprit are both at the table; whoever correctly solves the mystery gets a million bucks. He leaves the room, and the guests are reluctant to split up....
It took me a minute to realize that all the detectives were parodies of other fictional detectives I knew. Sam Diamond (Falk) is obviously based not on Columbo but on Sam Spade, with emphasis on his hard-boiled bluntness and bigotry, not least toward gal pal Tess (Eileen Brennan). Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith) correspond to Nick and Nora Charles, albeit with Dick acting way too haughty for a man of lower-class origins, Dora not showing many smarts, and their dog Myron having little to do. Milo Perrier (James Coco) sends up Hercule Poirot as a glutton, and he and assistant Marcel (a debuting James Cromwell) get confused by each others' Franco-Belgian accents. Miss Marbles (Elsa Lanchester) was the first comic name to jump out at me, punning on Miss Marple; unfortunately, as a late addition to the script, she doesn't offer much besides caring for an even older nurse (Estelle Winwood). Finally, Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers) makes fun of Charlie Chan with broken-English adages and lousy treatment of his adopted son, Willie (Richard Narita).
"Oh great," you may think, "Sellers in yellowface." Well, I'm willing to give political incorrectness a pass when it's mocking other political incorrectness. An annoyed Twain points out how absurd it is for a brilliant man to have poor language skills after all these years in the country. And at his worst, Sellers is still no Mickey Rooney.
That said, the PI PIs aren't the funniest parts. More offensive to me, tho, are the gags involving blindness. No real blind person would open his front door all the way when he meant to close it. For "good" measure, there's also a maid (Nancy Walker) who appears to be completely deaf, completely mute, and completely illiterate, leading to severe communication failure with the butler -- tho she still presents a fresh note later.
Thankfully, the humor isn't always that broad or vulgar. While you don't have to know the original detectives to enjoy MbD any better than you have to know Hitchcock to enjoy High Anxiety, there's...well, a little more intellect than I've found in Mel Brooks movies. After all, the detectives are pretty good at what they do. So is Twain.
You can try to figure things out before they do. I succeeded in part. But Twain brings seemingly impossible technology in addition to red herrings (should I add a sci-fi tag?). In the end, not everything makes sense even according to internal logic. Either we're not supposed to think about it, or it's being funny on purpose. Regardless, Twain's got some nerve for calling his guests the ludicrous ones.
MbD's humor is a bit too dated to merit a classic status, but it did tickle me from time to time. I could see someone today laughing out loud at it. Considering some of the people involved, it could have turned out a lot worse.
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