The Last of Sheila (1973)
Trivia
From working on this movie, James Mason famously once said that Raquel Welch was "the most selfish, ill-mannered, inconsiderate actress that I have ever had the displeasure of working with."
Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim used to host murder mystery parlor games. One of their guests was producer and director Herbert Ross, who encouraged them to write a script based on this type of party.
Many of the actors and actresses were playing other famous people in Hollywood. For example, James Mason's character was based on an Orson Welles persona. Richard Benjamin was playing Anthony Perkins. Raquel Welch was told by screenwriters Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim that she was playing Ann-Margret - when, in fact, she was actually playing herself.
This was the only movie written by either Anthony Perkins or Stephen Sondheim.
Christine (Dyan Cannon) was based on Hollywood mega-agent Sue Mengers, who was Cannon's agent at the time. It has long been part of the behind-the-scenes lore of this movie that Mengers was originally offered the part but she declined (claiming she couldn't act) and recommended Cannon for the part; Cannon and Richard Benjamin had been previous clients of Mengers. However, during a January 26, 2020, American Cinematheque Q&A session with Richard Benjamin and Dyan Cannon, Cannon debunked this rumor, saying that while Mengers was the inspiration for the role, she had never been considered to play it.
This movie was inspired by a series of sophisticated real-life scavenger hunts conceived by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim in Manhattan, New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The pair put on these occasional ruses for their friends, such as Lee Remick and George Segal.
Dyan Cannon said of this movie on its 40th anniversary in 2013: "The film's location was set in the south of France. Now do you want to go to the south of France for a month or two? (laughs) As it turned out, we were filming on Sol Siegel (Sam Spiegel)'s yacht, and I'm not quite sure why they didn't think that through a little more, because the sea we were shooting on was unpredictable from day to day. So we had to wait in the south of France while they built a set at the Victorine Studios for us. We had to spend our days lying on the beach and going to lunch and shopping. It was a hard job."
The production was marred by much on-set conflict. This has been attributed to delays, weather, sea-sickness, personality clashes, over-crowding on the boat and the alleged prima donna antics of Raquel Welch. Reportedly, props were thrown across the set.
Filming the café scene was disrupted when an anti-Semitic terrorist group known as "Black September" informed police that a bomb had been placed near the set and would be detonated unless everyone left. With help from the local police, the actors, actresses, and crew carried on bravely and finished shooting on schedule at 3 a.m. Raquel Welch was quoted saying, "I was glad when we finished, and that the threat seems to have been a hoax."
Writer and director Edgar Wright showed this movie to his co-writer, Simon Pegg, as a source of influence for their collaboration in writing Hot Fuzz (2007).
From working on this movie, Ian McShane once said that Raquel Welch "isn't the most friendly creature. She seems to set out with the impression that no one is going to like her."
Screenwriters Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim won the 1974 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay from the Mystery Writers of America.
The joke name of the movie that Clinton Greene (James Coburn) derisively refers to Tommy Parkman's (Richard Benjamin's) latest movie, on which Tom had done a rewrite, was "A Fistful of Lasagne". This reference was a dig at the spaghetti western sub-genre where, about two years earlier, Coburn had appeared in the spaghetti western Duck You Sucker (1971).
Dyan Cannon put on thirty pounds to play the role of talent-agent Christine.
The screenplay by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim was novelized by Alexander Edwards as a book tie-in for this movie when it was released.
At the monastery, one of the characters states that the setting looks like one from a Hammer Studios movie. Yvonne Romain (Sheila Green) appeared in horror movies produced by Hammer Studios, like The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) and Night Creatures (1962).
In spite of Christine (Dyan Cannon) saying that she had lost fifty pounds, Cannon actually gained thirty pounds to play the part. According to her DVD commentary, she bought the thin gold waist chain featured as she floated in a bikini next to the ship. Her intention was that the length of the chain was the maximum waist measurement she wanted to achieve during her weight gain.
Partly shot at Victorine Studios in Nice, France while another movie, Day for Night (1973), was being shot. That movie also dealt with people in the movie business.
Shooting the monastery sequence just off Cannes proved to be troublesome for Raquel Welch. Gale force winds and rain disrupted the night shoot, and Welch was reluctant to leave her Venice hotel for fear of getting stuck in the storm. "This glamorous picture in the wonderful sunny Cote d'Azur has turned out to be a bit of a splodge", Welch told a journalist. "This is not my idea of an enjoyable evening, but they're paying you the money. I just go ahead and do it and don't complain."
The luxury yacht owned by Clinton Green (James Coburn) was a 165-foot yacht owned by producer Sam Spiegel.
Six of the seven main characters represented a different area of film industry production. They were an actress, producer, director, star manager, talent agent, and screenwriter.
This was the first theatrical movie that featured a song performed by Bette Midler (the track "Friends").
First of only two mystery movies directed by Herbert Ross. The second was The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976).
A television is showing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), which stars James Mason and mainly is set on a sea-going vessel. This movie also stars James Mason and is also set mainly on a sea-going vessel.
Though a song lyricist and composer of music, co-screenwriter Stephen Sondheim was not this movie's composer. The score was composed by Billy Goldenberg.
In his memoirs, Alec Mills said that he and Ernest Day worked on this movie for a brief time before they were fired.
The name of the luxury yacht was "Sheila". It was named after Sheila Green (Yvonne Romain), the deceased wife of Clinton Green (James Coburn). The flag flying on the boat was from Panama.
Included among the American Film Institute's 2001 list of 400 movies nominated for the top 100 Most Heart-Pounding American Movies.
Considering that co-screenwriter Stephen Sondheim is widely considered the greatest musical theater composer of his generation, it is notable that neither the film's score nor the song that closes the movie were written by him. Instead, the score was composed by Billy Goldenberg, and the closing song is "Friends," written by Buzzy Linhart and Mark "Moogy" Klingman and performed by Bette Midler.
Bette Midler performs the pop song that closes the movie. This film contains a character based on the real-life Hollywood agent Sue Mengers; many years later, Midler portrayed Mengers in the one-woman play "I'll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers," which ran on Broadway during the spring and summer of 2013.
Spoilers
One night after filming, Richard Benjamin says James Mason invited him out for drinks. It wasn't until about twenty minutes into their conversation that Benjamin realized Mason was basically rehearsing their final conversation through improvisation.
While trying to solve the first night's game, Anthony (Ian McShane) knocks on a door and is lambasted in French by the occupant for disturbing someone sick. Meanwhile, a neon sign for "Hotel Sterling" is clearly visible behind him, across the street and up-screen from his character. Unbeknownst to him at that time, the Hotel Sterling was the proper place to go to solve that night's clue.
At one point, Lee tells Tom, "I'd kill myself for a hot bath. Clinton has the only tub." Towards the end of the film, she is found in Clinton's bathtub dead of an apparent suicide.
The movie establishes that Philip is one of the smartest, if not the smartest games player of the group. He's the first one to arrive at Hotel Sterling during the first game, and, while he's temporarily thrown off the track, he returns and is the third player to find the correct clues, and thus finish the game, as he is the first card holder. In the second game, he is the first to discover Clinton's location. He is the only member of the group to figure out the true solution to the mystery, though confronting the killer nearly gets him murdered. One other character hears the solution, which saves Phillip's life, but, ultimately, it is Philip himself who figures everything out, "wins" the game, and is rewarded with likely success and a career resurrection.
