Film Friday: Clue (1985)

With Scott reviewing Battleship, which is based on a board game, it’s time to review one of my favorite comedies, which also happens to be based on a board game: Clue. Clue was a box office bomb that his since become a cult classic for the same reason we discussed about Highlander becoming a cult classic, i.e. this was a good film which confused the generic public.

Plot

Directed and co-written by Jonathan Lynn (My Cousin Vinny), co-written by John Landis (The Blues Brothers, Animal House), and produced by Debra Hill (who typically collaborated with John Carpenter), Clue involves an all-star cast who find themselves stuck in a mansion on a rainy night in the 1950s. Each of the people invited to the mansion has been given a false name to hide their identity and a potential murder weapon. The audience will recognize these names from the board game “Clue.” Soon, Mr. Body turns up dead and they all have motives for killing him. They must solve the murder before the police arrive. In the meantime, they need to deal with the fact that the staff and everyone who shows up at their front door ends up being killed. Simple enough, right? Well, that’s a matter of some debate.

What Makes This Film Work

Clue failed with general audiences, but has since become a cult classic. The conventional wisdom is that cult films are bad films that somehow find an audience because they are quirky and quirkiness magically finds audiences. As I mentioned when discussing Highlander, however, I don’t buy that. I suspect cult films are actually good films which fail with general audiences because they put too much faith in their audience and they don’t spell things out clearly enough for general audiences to understand them.

In Highlander, the problem was that the film lacked the exposition general audiences need. It flashed back and forth between the present and the past without a character saying, “Do you remember what things were like 400 years ago?” It also used clever dialog rather than exposition to give the audience background information, such as having a character read two words from the newspaper (“baffled” and “incompetent”) rather than having a character explain through exposition the status of the current police investigation. This was beyond general audience’s ability to comprehend.

Clue does the comedy version of this. Indeed, the film is packed with jokes that are not highlighted and punchlines that require the audience to remember what they were told earlier. For example, when Michael McKean’s character (Mr. Green) refers to himself as a plant, Leslie Ann Warren (Ms. Scarlet) quips, “I thought men like you were called a fruit.” This is a reference to his having been outed earlier as gay, but no one reminds you of this when she makes the quip. . . you need to remember. That apparently asks too much of general audiences and this film is full of these moments where the writers leave it up to the audience to piece the jokes together. In fact, the only time Clue actually reminds you of something to make sure you got the joke was when Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn) tells you that her husband is dead. This is the punchline to a joke from several minutes earlier where White was asked what her husband does and she acts cagey before responding, “He just lies around all day.” In this instance, the writers felt the audience wouldn’t get it, so they had Ms. Scarlet remind everyone of White’s earlier statement by saying, “So that’s what you meant when you said ___!” This feels incredibly clunky when it happens and it stands out as the film talking down to you. But ironically, it only feels that way because the film doesn’t do this at any other point; most films did this so often that you stop noticing they are doing it. So why would the writers of Clue do this? Because it preserves the pacing and it makes the dialog punchier and more natural when you aren’t constantly stopping to explain things to the audience.

Clue is also crawling with unexplained jokes which take a quick mind to spot. Consider this joke by Professor Plumb (Christopher Lloyd). He is asked who he works for and he responds, “The United Nations Organization.” But, someone asks, aren’t you a psychiatrist, not a politician? He responds that he works for a sub-agency called “the World Health Organization.” Nothing more is said to drive the joke home and general audiences probably didn’t even know there was a joke here. Yet, the people who would become the film’s cult audience pretty quickly realized that the initials of these organizations together are “WHO UNO,” which was actually what they were trying to figure out – who they all knew in common. This is similar to two jokes in Men in Black, where Will Smith refers to their car as a “Ford POS” and where Zed says to the failed applicants, “You’re what we’ve come to expect from years of government training.” Neither joke is ever explained and I can tell you that the audience I saw the film with missed both jokes, but a couple people got them.

Even beyond this, Clue does lots of things you have to think about to get. When they separate, for example, they manage to put the most perfectly incompatible people together as teams, such as people who threatened to kill each other earlier or how Yvette (Coleen Camp), who every man is after and who flirts with every man, gets randomly teamed up with Mr. Green, who is gay. At no point do the characters say, “hey, we’re incompatible,” but if you’ve been using your brains throughout, you quickly realize the irony in all of the pairings. Similarly, the character names are all ironic in one form or another. Mrs. White is a black widow who dresses head-to-toe in black except for a white liner on her cape. Ms. Scarlet runs a house of prostitution, i.e. a “red-light” establishment, and is later accused of being communist (i.e. a red) – Communism is then described to as “a red herring.” Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull) is a Major and reveals himself to be a coward (i.e. yellow). Mr. Green is a plant and plants are green. Professor Plumb is a psychiatrist who plumbs the human mind. Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan) is an overdressed, ostentatious woman who fits the expression “proud as a peacock.” In each instance, these jokes are there for you to see them if you can spot them, but the filmmakers never explain them or point them out.

The film also includes a lot of wordplay where you need to be able connect the fact that the characters are using different means for the same words. The best example of this is when Mrs. Peacock is revealed to have taken bribes in a mensroom in exchange for delivering the vote of her husband the Senator. When this is pointed out, it gets asked rhetorically “What do you think of that?” Scarlet responds, “I think it stinks.” Peacock immediately counters, “How would you know? When were you in that mensroom?” Notice that her response not only ascribes a different meaning to the word “stinks” than Scarlet meant, but it also flips the subject of Scarlet’s comment from the bribe to the mensroom. This is a great verbal trick, but it requires the audience to think and it requires the audience to realize that a joke has been told. Most films would alert the audience to this by having a character say, “I think she meant the situation, not the mensroom stank!” and that’s the point when general audiences finally laugh. Clue didn’t do this.

This is what I suspect turned off general audiences. As with Highlander and several other cult classics that come to mind, few of the jokes were spoon-fed, and that led people like Roger Ebert (who was King of the Simps despite pretending to be erudite) to see the movie as a series of “throwaway gags and one liners” which he didn’t think were funny. Clearly though, he just didn’t understand the jokes because few of them can legitimately be called one liners, as each was carefully set up over time, and as none of the gags were throwaways as each provides clues as to the motives of the characters.

Finally, there’s one more thing which hurt this film. When the film was originally shown in theaters, they used a gimmick to market it. The film was shot with three possible endings. Depending on which theater you went to, you saw a different ending. The idea was to get people to see the movie three times (these days, all three are stuck together), but this proved a problem with general audiences because the public wants the story in a tidy package, they don’t want to work for it. Giving them multiple possible endings puts the onus on them to finish the story and general audiences don’t like that.

Ebert tries to justify his own need to have things spoon-fed to him by claiming that having multiple endings made the entire film “meaningless.” That’s a rather telling conclusion. Alternate endings are highly prized by film buffs who love seeing the “craft” and enjoy thinking about the possibilities that were considered. The idea of alternate endings also forms the foundation of the human fascination with reliving the past and asking the “what if” question that is so popular in science fiction. To see a film as “meaningless” merely because it offers you different endings to choose from speaks of a one-dimensional mind that doesn’t want to use independent judgment, not any flaw within the film.

This is why Clue struggled with general audiences but has since found a cult following, not because this is a stupid quirky film, but because it is a good, extremely well-written film which just didn’t spoon-feed general audiences enough.