Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Sameeha Pugh It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

treeline1 James Coburn stars as a movie bigwig who hosts six pals for a week on his yacht in the south of France. He loves intricate puzzles and has planned a clever game that will identify the killer of his late wife.A famous cast is the highlight of this film and while it oozes glamour and Hollywood in-jokes, my mind wandered and it took three tries to finish watching it. Coburn is robust and charismatic and also convincingly sadistic. Dyan Cannon is good as an airhead agent but her never-ending, raucous guffaws are tiresome. Ian McShane and Raquel Welch are good as minor characters. Joan Hackett, Richard Benjamin, and James Mason have the most screen time; they are all excellent in well-developed roles and a pleasure to watch.In my opinion, the game that the guests are playing is too convoluted and pointless to follow; there are constant red herrings and it doesn't amount to much in the end. One of the stars leaves halfway through and is greatly missed. Plot holes abound and it's hard to identify with any of the characters or the story.This film is recommended for those who like complex puzzles and clues. I thought it was just okay.

Irie212 When it was released in 1973, "The Last of Sheila" hit me like a shot of Johnny Walker red (the preferred snort of the Hollywood heiress played by Joan Hackett). Then, a few months ago, it turned up streaming on Netflix. I watched it again and enjoyed it so thoroughly that I chose it several months later to watch with a house guest– a friend who knows so little about movies that, during "Dial M for Murder," he asked, "Who's that actress?" He enjoyed it, too, enough to discuss it afterward–- something I applaud even though I agree with this pithy bit of dialog spat out by a magnificent James Coburn: "We don't want this topic to degenerate to the discussion phase." "Sheila" is a murder mystery that begins with Sheila herself getting killed in a hit-and-run. That happens before the opening credits. Then her marvelously malevolent widower, a movie producer (James Coburn), sets out to nail the killer. He invites six Hollywood friends for a Mediterranean cruise on his yacht. Once on board, he involves them in an elaborate game to play as an amusement. They don't know it, but the real point of the game is diabolical: to find out who killed Sheila, because Coburn knows that one of them ran her down. It happened during a party that they all attended, and they all had motives. Indeed, the point of the movie, in a way, is that everyone in heartless Hollywood has a motive to kill everyone else. Upon arrival at the yacht, he hands each of the six a card on which is written "You are a…" followed by a personal secret, something "not too light": Shoplifter, Homosexual, Ex-Convict, Informer, Little Child Molester, and Alcoholic. (S,H,E,I,L,A— though the players don't notice that because they haven't yet seen each other's cards).The game involves everyone finding out the others' assigned secrets, and first up is the Shoplifter. Each player is given the same clue– a key with "Sterling 18K" stamped on it– to find out who has the Shoplifter card. With that clue they are ferried to shore to find the answer. Without giving too much away, I can say that the Shoplifter card was assigned to James Mason, but one of the women characters was actually arrested some years earlier for shoplifting a fur coat. She therefore realizes that something more than a harmless game is afoot. The card she holds, Homosexual, is obviously someone else's real secret.Before it's all over, three characters are dead, courtesy of two others, and there are two additional murder attempts, perpetrated by separate players with separate motives.The screenplay is altogether unique, co-authored as it is by two very famous men, neither of whom wrote any other screenplays, alone or together: Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins. The plot is entirely consistent with the friends' fondness for elaborate game-playing. Their dialog is brisk, witty, and delightfully vicious. Except for the predictably wooden work of Richard Benjamin, the performances are sparkling. Dyan Cannon grabs her juicy part with both hands, while Raquel Welch delivers her juicy parts in a bikini. Ultimately, though, the movie belongs to the two Jameses, Coburn and Mason. Mason's character– who shares many traits with Humbert Humbert, including the most obvious– is an aging director who ultimately unravels the mystery.Saying more means revealing more, and Sheila's tangled web is best woven before a viewer's eyes without advance knowledge. The only thing I will add is that the film was shot on location on French Riviera. The principal murder takes place in a wonderfully gloomy old site which, I suspect, is the fortified monastery of Ile Saint-Honorat, near Cannes. Gamesmanship is evident even in that choice: a suitable spot for an unholy picture about Hollywood.

tedg This really does have significant spoilers. See the movie first.For many people, this would be a mild amusement. As I am interested in the tools for imagination accessible to me, I am interested in narrative structure in film. That means that the evolution and elaborations of the noir-mystery family tree is essential to me. Sometimes I watch a film that plays with or advances some concept in this family and find its only value is noting where it fits in the streams that I use.But this film is actually good as a mystery, as an engaging amusement.It is a film about film people, assembling to make a film that we discover is the film we see. It is a mystery in which the traditional detective roles are reversed. Usually we would have a lone detective with a closed, captive set of suspects, here on a yacht. Here, the suspects are all turned into detectives to solve a murder of a year previously; the device for this is a game designed by the owner of the yacht, the husband of the murdered woman and the producer of the film-to-be-made. While they talk of something to be staged and photographed, and we watch something staged and photographed, the central clue is a photograph that has been carefully staged.It was written by an actor, based on real mystery games he conducted in his own home, then translated to screen with James Coburn playing the role of the writer. The murderer as it turns out is the writer.Within this remarkably imaginative structure are all sorts of clever elaborations of the genre. The Christie-Sayers model has one major upset of presumptions and one minor upset through an unrelated disclosure. Here, we have several:— the game to uncover the murder of Sheila turns out to not have been so. It was "rewritten" by the writer to be so. (Much is made of the fact that he is at a point in his career where writing is impossible and only rewriting occurs.) Later in the game he rewrites the evidence at the scene.— the confessed murderer of the gamemaker — which happens during the film — turns out to have been mistaken, but this is discovered too late for her.— the murder (of the gamemaker) is not because of anything intended in the game, nor related to the prior murder, but to a completely independent crime committed long before.— our special redhead, played in this case by a ditsy Raquel Welch, is the likely suspect. It is revealed that her "secret" was that she stole a garment. The murder occurs on a day in the game focused on her, and the gamemaker (Coburn) when murdered is dressed in a priest's getup, but with a redhead wig and makeup. A major twist comes when we discover that our writer — who is a ventriloquist (we see his puppets) — in rewriting the murder scene has used the corpse of the gamemaker as priest as redheaded whore as dummy.— the whole thing is unraveled at the end not by a conventional detective, but by the director of the upcoming film who is carefully working out the story he is to film. In the end, the murderer is not arrested as usual, but made to be complicit in the creation of the film we see. Watching a second time, you can see his discomfort in this repeated fold of him re-enacting the story.Very, very clever. A whole lot of fun, and if you allow it to, it stretches those folding muscles.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

JLRMovieReviews Written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, this is all about Sheila: her death a year ago and a little game that James Coburn cooked up for his immediate friends who were all there the night of the party, when Sheila died in a hit-and-run. The invitations went to husband and wife Richard Benjamin (who's a Hollywood writer) and Joan Hackett, who's rich; couple Raquel Welch, actress, and Ian McShane; has-been director James Mason, and Dyan Cannon, who's an agent.Its intricate plot and fun cat-and-mouse intrigues make for an entertaining movie and is far too complicated to get into here, but, even on my second viewing, it still is somewhat confusing with all of its minute details and contradicting alibis. Hint: pay special attention to the cards given to each person.Can you figure it out before the ultimate ending? Granted, the killer's somewhat obvious, looking back on it, but its perverseness instills a creepy feel to it and leaves the viewer feeling, what just happened?So, watch and witness "The Last of Sheila," if you dare.