Patron Pick – The Last of Sheila

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

The Last of Sheila (1973)
Written by Anthony Perkins & Stephen Sondheim
Directed by Herbert Ross

Once upon a time, the man who would direct Footloose and Steel Magnolias made a film based on a screenplay by “Norman Bates” and the guy who wrote Sweeney Todd. This film would significantly influence Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc/Knives Out movies. For the first time in a long time, I had an American film suggested to me I had never heard of before. I attribute this to the fact that I’m not a big mystery-Whodunnit fan. I can’t pinpoint why, but those stories don’t appeal to me, so I rarely seek them out, likely due to their formulaic structures. I was pleased about this suggestion because it plays out and delivers an ending with a lot more dramatic heft than I anticipated.

Clinton Greene (James Coburn) gathers six friends for a one-week Mediterranean cruise aboard his yacht named for his late wife Sheila, a gossip columnist killed in a hit-and-run. The driver has never been caught. Greene is a fan of parlor games, so the cruise is structured around each guest’s “crime,” a card they are given and told to keep secret. With each stop of the yacht, the guests go ashore and search for clues that reveal a partygoer and their “crime.” 

However, the first revealed crime of “shoplifting” causes Alice (Raquel Welch) to question if these aren’t real crimes committed by each guest. While it was someone else that had shoplifting, Alice admits she was arrested for it years ago, before she was famous. It was initially believed by the guests that this was meant to memorialize Sheila through her profession, but now they think Greene will reveal that one of them was the driver who killed his wife. 

The story is seen mainly from the viewpoint of screenwriter Tom Parkman (Richard Benjamin), who is attending the cruise with his wife, Lee (Joan Hackett). Parkman is precisely the sort of protagonist you might expect in this sort of film; he shares a major trait with the people who wrote this story, so that literary analytical mind is crucial in cracking open the truth of this cruise.

However, Perkins & Sondheim are so wonderfully clever they throw a wild curveball in the third act, which will completely recontextualize much of the story on reflection. Everything was reasonably standard, not necessarily predictable, but I wasn’t surprised by how things played out until the end. Then we reach the final moment where the cruise events are explained in total, leaving the audience stunned. I also appreciate the darkly cynical resolution, playing on our expectations of justice being done and becoming more like film noir.

The rest of the cast comprises Dyan Cannon as a ballsy female talent agent, James as a washed-up director now working on commercials, and Ian McShane as the agent/husband to Raquel Welch’s Alice. But nowhere amongst this group is a professional detective. That’s the element that made me like this more than something like Glass Onion, which even Rian Johnson has said was inspired by this film. The trope of the detective who puts all the pieces together is rarely done with enough interesting variation to make that part of the story feel interesting. More often than not, it’s a case of the filmmakers withholding critical information from the audience to make the surprise happen. In The Last of Sheila, there are clear indicators along the way that something is off. The reveal scene helps us make sense of all the evidence laid out on the table.

Part of The Last of Sheila’s appeal is the magic trick it ends up being. The camera focuses on Parkman, a big part of the distraction. You can focus on other characters when they have scenes and use that information to crack the case before Parkman. There are no cheap hidden passageways, and the killer is someone who has been on screen since the whole cast was introduced. No one comes across evidence by accident; it is intentionally discovered by those curious enough to look and mull it over. There are people the film hints might be the real killer without ever being heavy-handed or leading us astray. A natural tension comes out when the guests begin to suspect what Greene is planning to do, and the fact that so many of the “crimes” line up with things they actually did makes them paranoid. 

The Last of Sheila is a light movie with a darkly heavy ending. There were precise moments where the filmmakers were getting inspiration from the Italian giallo horror/mystery movies with first-person POV shots from the killer’s perspective. It’s a movie with a surprisingly small body count where the emphasis is more on putting together the pieces. I loved how the story plays some tricks with the audience about Greene and his motivations, which pays off beautifully in the end. If you are in the mood for a classic “Ten Little Indians” style mystery flick, The Last of Sheila delivers something impressive.