The Last of Sheila (Herbert Ross, 1973)

Actor Anthony Perkins and songwriter Stephen Sondheim moonlighted as screenwriters to create this jeu d'esprit, a murder mystery involving the kind of elaborate games that Perkins and Sondheim and their friends used to play: treasure hunts with ingenious clues. The setup is this: A year earlier, Sheila, the wife of film producer Clifton Green (James Coburn), was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Green invites six people who were at a party the night of her death to spend a week on his yacht, which is named for her. Before they board, he arranges them for a photo under her name on the prow of the yacht. Then he announces that he is going to give each of them an envelope that contains a secret: something that a person would want to conceal about themselves. Each night, they will dock at a different location and will be given a clue that they must follow to discover the secret. If the person who holds the card with the secret on it solves the puzzle, the hunt of the night is over. So, on the first night, the clues lead to the secret: "Shoplifter." And when Philip (James Mason), a washed-up film director who holds that clue, solves it, the game ends. But the next night, the game isn't completed: Green is found murdered during the hunt. Meanwhile, realization dawns in the group that the secrets were their own: Philip wasn't a shoplifter, but the actress named Alice (Raquel Welch) admits that she once lifted a valuable fur coat from a store. And when the secret for the night Green is killed is revealed to be "Homosexual," Tom (Richard Benjamin), a screenwriter, admits that he and Green once had a brief affair. And so it appears that Green was murdered by someone who didn't want their secret to come out. But just when it appears that the murder has been solved, there's another intricate twist. The screenplay is fiendishly clever, and it's well acted: The other players include Dyan Cannon as a high-powered agent, Joan Hackett as Tom's rich heiress wife, and Ian McShane as Alice's manager-husband. Unfortunately, Herbert Ross directs things a little clunkily, although some of the awkwardness may come from the fact that shooting began on the yacht itself, but bad weather held up the shoot and sets eventually had to be constructed on a soundstage. There was also reportedly some conflict among the cast members and the director, centering on Welch. Today, some of the film's attitudes seem a little antique: Homosexuality is no longer such a terrible secret, although at the time Perkins and Sondheim, both of whom were gay, were still closeted. And perhaps not enough is made of the fact that one of the clues outs a character as a former child molester. The resulting film is something like a soufflé that didn't rise, turning out tasty but a little chewy. The best moments belong to, not surprisingly, Cannon, one of those performers who make every film they're in a little better.

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

Back in the day, by which I mean the early 1960s, The Seventh Seal was one of the films -- along with Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) and La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) -- that you had to have seen just to be considered culturally literate. Its stock has fallen considerably since then, thanks to a distaste for Ingmar Bergman's inquiries into faith. I hadn't seen it for many years until I decided to watch it last night, and I was expecting my reaction to be similar to the one I had recently watching Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly (1961): too much talking, not enough showing. I had, in fact, remembered very little from The Seventh Seal beyond the knight playing chess with death and the final dance of death across the horizon -- both of which have been parodied and copied ever since. And it is, still, much too talky: Epigrams about God and Death pile up on one another tiresomely.  But I had forgotten how human a fable it is. I think it succeeds where Through a Glass Darkly fails, partly because of setting: The glum isolation of the island in the later film puts all our concentration on the actors and the torment their characters inflict on one another. If Through a Glass Darkly is intended to raise questions about faith, about human beings' relationship to a god, it misses the mark. The world the characters of the film inhabit is not a world energized by faith, so their preoccupation with it seems pointless. But the setting of The Seventh Seal is an age of faith -- perhaps the last one our civilization will ever know -- which adds an urgency to the characters' wrangling with it. It became obvious to me on this viewing that the key character is not the knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), but his squire, Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), the sardonic commentator on the events. Jöns is our surrogate, the skeptic with a decidedly modern view of his era's religious extremism, such as the Crusade he and the knight have just been on. What we're witnessing is the merciful escape from a god that for some reason Bergman's modern characters keep hunting: the god of certainty -- the kind of certainty that breeds fanaticism and bigotry. In the end, Bergman's knight sacrifices himself to Death (Bengt Ekerot) so that ordinary people -- the players Jof (Nils Poppe) and Mia (Bibi Andersson) and their child -- may live to continue their secular amusements that had earlier been interrupted by fanatics and flagellants. Commentators have sometimes likened the plague that threatens the world of The Seventh Seal to the threat of nuclear annihilation, but I think that misses the point: For the medieval world, the Plague was a test of faith; for the modern world, the Bomb is a test of humanity.  .