by Johnathan Lynn, 1985.
Starring: Eileen Brennan, Colleen Camp, Tim Curry, Bill Henderson, Howard Hesseman, Madeline Kahn, Jeffrey Kramer, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Kellye Nakahara, Lee Ving, Lesley Ann Warren, and Jane Wiedlan.
Rating: 10/10, 8/10.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that Clue is the all-time best movie ever to be based on a board game.
One by one six people—three men and two women, all using aliases—arrive at a big spooky house, to be welcomed by Wadsworth (Curry), the butler, and Yvette (Camp), the maid. Soon a Mr. Boddy (Ving) arrives, and Wadsworth tells the guests that it is Mr. Boddy who has been blackmailing them all these years. They all have their guilty little secrets: Mrs. Peacock (Brennan), a senator’s wife, takes bribes in exchange for sensitive information; Mrs. White (Kahn) has most likely murdered several of her husbands; Mr. Plum (Lloyd) did what "doctors aren’t supposed to do with their lady patients"; Mr. Green (McKean) will lose his job with the government if they find out that he’s gay; Colonel Mustard (Mull) has much more money than he should for reasons that are at first unclear; and Miss Scarlet (Warren) runs a bordello. The lights go out, there’s all sorts of murderous noises, and when they come back on, Mr. Boddy is dead.
They pair off, each with the person they least want to be with, and the second act of the film follows all four pairs of people (Mrs. Peacock and Mr. Plum, Mrs. White and Wadsworth, Mr. Green and Yvette, Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet) exploring the house to make sure there’s no one else there. Along the way, more people arrive and are killed, the lights go out, secret passages are discovered, they have a party with the dead people to fool a cop, and chandeliers fall. The third act consists of Wadworth’s explanation of what actually happened.
Clue is really one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. Practically every line is memorable ("Why is the car stopped?" "It’s frightened!"), and the cast has comic talent and easy chemistry (in the "they act well together", not the "the characters have chemistry" sense) out the wazoo. And the film follows in the great tradition of screwball comedies, where things start out slow, but then one thing happens, and another thing happens, and it all snowballs and by the end it’s built so much momentum that you can’t even see how it could stop without hurting itself.
Another way it's like screwball comedies is in the rapid-fire, witty style of the dialogue. Take this exchange, for example:
Colonel Mustard: How many husbands have you had?
Mrs. White: Mine, or other women's?
Colonel Mustard: Yours.
Mrs. White: Five.
Colonel Mustard: Just five?
Mrs. White: Yes, just the five.
Or this:
Colonel Mustard: Well, you tell them it's not true!
Miss Scarlet: It's not true.
Wadsworth: Is that true?
Miss Scarlet: No, it's not true.
Mr. Green: A-ha! So it IS true!
Wadsworth: A double negative!
Colonel Mustard: A double negative? You mean you have photographs?
Wadsworth: That sounds like a confession to me! In fact, the double negative has led to proof positive.
Colonel Mustard: Are you trying to make me look stupid in front of the other guests?
Wadsworth: You don't need me to do that, sir.
Colonel Mustard: That's right!
All this said with no pause. It's great. But too much quoting, not enough reviewing. Nothing more to say except this:
One final note: because of the momentum that I was just talking about, DO NOT WATCH this movie on television. You’ll probably see it playing on Comedy Central quite a lot, but please, please, do not watch it. The commercials completely ruin the effect.