Despite behind-the-scenes drama, Capote gives a delicious performance in this gay director’s whodunit

Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we’re revisiting the 1976 whodunit Murder By Death in the wake of its “cameo” on Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans.

Whodunits have always been part of the queer canon. It’s a genre not necessarily known for portraying queer relationships or dynamics explicitly, but rather one that speaks directly to the interests and themes that resonate with us.

Whether it’s devouring Agatha Christie novels, staying up late to marathon episodes of Murder, She Wrote, or memorizing every single line of Clue, this is a genre that’s long appealed to our community.

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And while the history of the whodunit is quite expansive, its framework is rather limited—and that’s the fun of it—with thousands of variations that use the same handful of narrative tropes and characters: a detective, a group of suspects, a secluded location, and scattered clues to put together. Change just one of those elements and suddenly you have a completely different story; the opportunities are endless! (A board game was literally created with this in mind.)

And, in turn, that interchangeable template has been applied to a wide range of tones and subgenres. While they are all whodunits, Scream is also a slasher, Clue is a comedy, Gosford Park is a historical drama, and (the newer) Sherlock Holmes is an action flick. Whodunits have taken so many forms throughout the years that it makes them fertile ground to be parodied and mocked.

The Set-Up

In 1976, playwright Neil Simon decided to quite literally bring together every major trope and character that have made up the whodunit canon up to that point, set them all inside a mansion and pit them against each other against their own game: what if every detective—all of whom have claimed their own worlds to be the best investigator alive—was tasked to solve the same murder? What would happen and who would come out on top? Thus, Murder By Death was born.

Simon, along with renowned theater director Robert Moore (who, among other things, helmed the original production of The Boys In The Band) gathered some of the biggest and most impressive comedic talent of the time and set them out to play together in a battle of wits, mechanical tricks, and plot twists in a film that, although it tries valiantly, ends up failing at successfully creating the very thing it set out to poke fun at.

Detective Vs. Detective Vs…

In Murder By Death, the five most renowned detectives in the world receive an invitation for “dinner and a murder” by a mysterious host that each of them have past ties with.

Inspector Sydney Wang (Peter Sellers in egregious yellowface) is inspired by the mystery novels starring police detective Charlie Chan (and is perhaps the element of the film that makes it the hardest to watch today). Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Dame Maggie Smith) are two socialite, posh investigators based on Nick and Nora Charles from the Thin Man series. Milo Perrier (James Coco) and Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester) are a parody of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, respectively. And Sam Diamond (Peter Falk, in an eerily close embodiment of his iconic character Columbo) is a take on Sam Spade, Dashiel Hammett’s leading character from the classic noir, The Maltese Falcon. 

And Introducing: Truman Capote

They’ve all been gathered by the eccentric millionaire Lionel Twain, who wants to find out once and for all who the biggest detective of all time is. He tells the guests that a murder will be taking place in the mansion at midnight, and that whoever solves it will get one million dollars.

If you’ve been watching the latest season of Feud: Capote vs the Swans, this scene may seem familiar to you—because Lionel Twain is played by none other than Truman Capote himself! In the pilot episode of the series, we can see him struggling to remember his lines, drunk and anxious, on the set of this movie.

But performance anxiety depicted on the FX series doesn’t necessarily reflect on the final film; perhaps Feud was stretching its artistic license a bit too much. Capote gives a clever and committed performance, savoring every line delivery quite deliciously. Every character is actually played rather brilliantly by their respective actors (even Sellers is committed as he can be, as offensive as that character is) and they lean on the ticks, tropes, and mannerisms that made their original counterparts famous and recognizable.

Related:

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A Real Head-Scratcher

However, while the movie succeeds at imitating what makes these characters both memorable and ridiculous, —setting in motion a plot that seems to combine every whodunit narrative trope put together—it falls apart as it goes, getting more convoluted with every rotating dining room, disappearing corpse, and revealed motive after revealed motive.

The film commits the cardinal sin in a parody: it never properly builds up the thing it’s making fun of before trying to bring it down. The mystery and logic of the crime that the film explains just doesn’t make sense and feels more like a series of well-delivered one-liners and jokes rather than a smart deconstruction of the genre.

Get A Clue

Neil Simon’s stamp is clearly all over the script, and the quips and punchlines that the characters deliver are quite clever and funny out of context. Robert Moore’s queer sensibility is also quite explicit, particularly with the framing of the female characters as glamorous and venomous vixens, a paramount of why our community tends to gravitate to this genre.

Though if what you are looking for is a movie that has a group of talented actors at their comedic best dissecting the twists and turns on one of the most everlasting genres in entertainment, you’d be much better off rewatching Clue for the hundredth time. Because you know you want to.

Murder By Death is available for digital rental or purchase via AppleTV+, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, Vudu, and YouTube TV.

Related:

‘Glass Onion’ plus 9 more whodunits that prove why the genre’s a queer favorite

From ‘Clue’ to ‘Scream,’ the whodunit has long been a favorite of mystery seekers, but the genre holds a special place in the hearts of queer movie lovers.