Gumshoes

By J.C.

MURDER BY DEATH

Directed by ROBERT MOORE Screenplay by NEIL SIMON

Take a shot at this: try talking about a Neil Simon piece--play or movie or TV sketch--without retelling one of his gags. It is no secret that Simon's writing depends mostly on jokes, the kind of good delicatessen dialogue comedy writers toss off during a fast lunch. Niceties like plot and characterization are provided largely to make the jokes work. Simon's characters have quirks in place of personalities, and they tend to talk alike, because the jokes have little to do with the people who say them. Sometimes Simon conveys the uneasy feeling that dialogue from The Odd Couple could have been transposed from Plaza Suite, and that any one of the population of Murder by Death, convivial as they may be, could be set down, unruffled, in the middle of California Suite (TIME, June 21).

Easy Laughter. This may explain the feeling that Simon is working the audience over even as he is making it laugh. At the end of Murder by Death, which is casually funny and lovingly acted, one feels manipulated by a master. The laughter comes easy but it is always without challenge or surprise. Simon has all the blessings of supreme craftsmanship and most of the limitations as well. After a bit, even his skill starts to get in his way, as if one had called up

Dial-a-Joke and got an LP recording.

Murder by Death, a broad send-up of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, is fair enough fun. Simon's jokes, if pre dictable, are also reliable, and Director Robert Moore has recruited some splendid actors to make them work. It is Simon's notion that Eccentric Millionaire and Amateur Criminologist Lionel Twain (played by Truman Capote, whose witless impersonation ought to make him ashamed of all the snotty things he has said about actors) invites a group of the world's greatest detectives to his mansion "for dinner and a murder." On the guest list: Milo Perrier (James Coco), a pudgy, smug and over bearing Belgian sleuth; tough, trench-coated Sam Diamond (Peter Falk) and his loyal secretary Tess Skeffington (Eileen Brennan); Jessica Marbles, a cunningly dotty Englishwoman (Elsa Lanchester) and her ailing nurse Miss Withers (Estelle Winwood); Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers), a grindingly polite Oriental given to compulsive aphorisms and faulty grammar; and the unflappably elegant, bibulous society sleuths, Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith). Dealing with the guests are Bensonmum the Butler (Alec Guinness), who is blind, and Yetta the Maid (Nancy Walker), who cannot hear or speak. It is one measure of Simon's skill, however, that Yetta earns the movie's biggest laugh without recourse to dialogue.

Compounded Confusion. The murder victim is ... well, one of the above, and all the rest are suspects. Everyone has a solution to the crime, each improbable, amusing and thoroughly confounding. The explanation at the final fade-out is compounded, confusion, a mess of accusations, counteraccusations and ratiocination run amuck.

Even so, Murder by Death lacks the verbal facility of Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound, its startling invention and its fine edge of intellectual gamesmanship. Stoppard mocked the conventional mystery form, but he expanded it even as he trifled with it. Simon just uses it for a setup. J.C.

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