The 1973 Mystery The Last of Sheila, from the Screenwriting Team of Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim Is a Whodunnit With Pizzazz
When the legendary Stephen Sondheim died recently at the age of 91 he had but a single screenplay credit to his name. That’s also true of the gentleman that Sondheim collaborated with during his sole sojourn as a screenwriter: Anthony Perkins.
Norman Bates and one of the greatest songwriters the world has ever known collaborated on the screenplay for Herbert Ross’ sublime 1973 show-business mystery The Last of Sheila, a show-business movie unlike any other. The team of Perkins and Sondheim proved as inspired as it was unexpected.
For their first, last and only produced screenplay, the preeminent cinematic bogeyman and musical theater titan took the old maxim to write what you know to heart.
Close friends as well as collaborators, Perkins and Sondheim had been throwing elaborate scavenger hunts/mystery parties for their famous pals throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including choreographer turned filmmaker Herbert Ross, who directed The Last of Sheila and produced it through his production company.
What if one of these murder mystery parties were to cross the line into real homicide? What if amateur sleuths were faced with a genuine murder? That’s the premise of The Last of Sheila.
Perkins and Sondheim drew from personal experience in other ways as well. They populated their fiendishly clever whodunit with show business folks brilliantly realized by a murderer’s row of actors playing possible murderers.
James Coburn plays Clinton Greene, the movie producer who brings everyone together on a week-long European yacht cruise
for his own sinister purposes as a trickster God. He’s a malevolent deity for whom everything is storytelling and spectacle, including the death of his wife Sheila Greene, a gossip columnist who died at the hands of an unknown hit and run driver a year before the movie’s action begins.
Clinton looks down on the movie folk on his ship as silly mortals to be manipulated and moved around like pieces on a chessboard. He’s the devil on everyone’s shoulder imploring them to be their worst, most evil selves.
To amuse himself and torment others, the movie producing megalomaniac has created a game designed to expose the secrets, lies and sins of everyone onboard.
The six players are given a card informing them that they are, for the purpose of the game, either a shoplifter, alcoholic, homosexual, informer, snoop and hit and run killer.
The goal of the game is for players to find out each other’s secrets while keeping competitors from discovering their secret identity. Clinton did not choose the “secrets” randomly, of course. He’s playing a bigger game than anyone onboard realizes, a game so dangerous and vast that he himself cannot survive it.
Clinton produces the events on the yacht the same way he would a motion picture but with real life stakes and genuine danger. Knowing everyone’s secrets gives the producer a power he can’t wait to flagrantly abuse.
The wildly charismatic Coburn is such a volcanic presence here that he continues to dominate the film even after he’s killed. It takes more than death to negate a force as ferocious as Coburn.
According to Hollywood lore, the juicy, scene-stealing role of Christine, a sharp-tongued and quick-witted super-agent, was originally offered to real-life agent and non-actor Sue Mengers, the inspiration for the character.
It’s easy to see why Mengers might turn down the role. It’s so viciously funny and gloriously mean in its depiction of the agent as a motormouth creature of id and ego with no filter and no limits that Mengers would have to be deeply masochistic to play it herself. It would go beyond self-deprecation to a place of gleeful self-evisceration.
As befits a movie about Hollywood ambition, desperation is the fuel that powers The Last of Sheila. Everybody wants something and will do anything to get it. This includes James Mason as Philip Dexter, a has been veteran director in need of a break he hopes his eccentric host can provide, and Richard Benjamin as Tom Parkman, a screenwriter with a very wealthy wife (Joan Hackett as Lee Parkman) and a flailing career.
Philip Dexter initially appears to be the kind of role Benjamin didn’t just specialize in but owned for decades: a wry, self-deprecating Jewish intellectual. By the end of the film, however, he’s something much different and much darker.
Benjamin is originally cast to type and then brazenly, boldly and brilliantly cast again type. No film has made better, more subversive use of the narcissism and rage lurking just underneath the actor’s affable exterior.
Raquel Welch and a young Ian McShane of Deadwood fame round out the cast as Alice Wood, a glamorous movie star hoping to play Sheila Greene in a biopic produced by Clinton, and Anthony, her scheming husband, a small-timer out of his depth, a sluggish guppie in a sea full of sharks and predators.
Being one of the preeminent sex symbols of her time, Welch was uniquely well-suited to playing beautiful actresses but where the other characters have layers and depth, Alice is all dazzling surfaces with nothing underneath.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of casting in a movie like this. You never want the killer to be the first person you’d suspect, which is thankfully not the case here. The filmmakers do a masterful job of distraction and sleight of hand, knowing intuitively that a movie this dazzling represents nothing less than magic.
The Last of Sheila affords us an opportunity to sneak onboard a luxury yacht at the height of New Hollywood and be one of the beautiful, brilliant, fabulous people. It’s an experience at once intimidating—who can possibly keep up?—and exhilarating.
The Last of Sheila offers an irresistible fantasy of wit and sophistication and glamour, where everyone is smart, accomplished, distractingly beautiful and dazzlingly verbal, the smartest of the smart set.
Sondheim and Perkins only wrote a single movie but that’s all it took to leave behind a formidable, impressive legacy as screenwriters on top of everything else Perkins and Sondheim did in their extraordinary careers.
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