Clue (Jonathan Lynn, 1985)

Clue (Jonathan Lynn, 1985)

Cast: Eileen Brennan, Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Lesley Ann Warren, Colleen Camp, Lee Ving, Bill Henderson, Jane Wiedlin, Jeffrey Kramer, Kellye Nakahara, Howard Hesseman. Screenplay: John Landis, Jonathan Lynn. Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper. Production design: John Robert Lloyd. Film editing: David Bretherton, Richard Haines. Music: John Morris.

Clue was something of a dud with critics and audiences when it premiered, but it has developed a following over the years. The idea was a daffy one: Make a movie based on a board game. But the game's roots are themselves cinematic: the murder mystery that takes place in a mysterious mansion, with an array of suspects and murder weapons. So all the movie version needs to do is provide backstories for the various characters -- Miss Scarlet, Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, et al. -- and some way of staging the murder so that the killer's identity remains unknown until the final reveal. Of course, the charm of the game is that the players are the detectives and the killer, weapon, and location of the crime vary every time it's played. Unfortunately, the screenwriters -- and there were many other hands in the script beyond the credited ones -- decided to go crazy and provide a multitude of victims, as well as three potential endings. The gimmick of showing a different ending each time was one reason the film flopped in theaters, and only really made sense when it was released on video and all three solutions to the mystery could be sampled. What the film has going for it is mainly a cast of comic actors familiar from Mel Brooks movies, Saturday Night Live, and other TV shows. There are a few bright lines but also a lot of unfunny running around, and any comedy that opens with a gag about stepping in dog shit has to work awfully hard to overcome that.  

Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975)

Cast: Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning, Chris Sarandon, Sully Boyar, Carol Kane, James Broderick, Lance Henriksen, Susan Peretz, Judith Malina. Screenplay: Frank Pierson. Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper. Production design: Charles Bailey. Film editing: Dede Allen.

Dog Day Afternoon is a tragicomic docudrama about an ill-advised, ill-planned bank robbery that went wrong in almost all ways imaginable. It gave Al Pacino one of his most entertainingly flamboyant roles as Sonny Wortzik, who wants the money to pay for his lover's sex reassignment surgery. In its day, this motive might have been played more for laughs than it would be today, but Chris Sarandon's performance as Leon, who wants to transition to female, brought a measure of sympathy to the character that it might otherwise have lacked. The film is, like so many of director Sidney Lumet's, notable not only for standout performances like Pacino's and Sarandon's, but also for its exceptional ensemble work among the hostages in the bank and the cops outside, a result of Lumet's going beyond the screenplay (which won an Oscar for Frank Pierson) to workshop dialogue and business among the groups, playing up the emerging Stockholm Syndrome of the hostages and the itchiness of the impatient cops.