The Murder Mystery Spoof Agatha Christie Fans Need To Watch

In the early- to mid-1970s, a number of prominent filmmakers found modest success with star-studded whodunnits. In 1972, Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine in a splendid adaptation of Anthony Shaffer's intricately plotted play "Sleuth." A year later, Herbert Ross directed the wickedly clever "The Last of Sheila," a mystery concocted by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, and featuring such marquee names as James Coburn, Dyan Cannon, Richard Benjamin, Raquel Welch, and James Mason. Then in 1974, moviegoers got a double dose of Agatha Christie with Sidney Lumet's "Murder on the Orient Express" (starring Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, and Vanessa Redgrave among many others), and Peter Collinson's "And Then There Were None" (with Richard Attenborough, Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, and Herbert Lom).

There was no cultural development driving this sudden spate of whodunnits; it was just a reminder that people love to watch a bunch of great actors get thrown into the same location where foul play has been committed, and then try to work out the identity of the killer before the master sleuth puts the pieces together. This mini-renaissance inspired other writers to get in on the whodunnit fun. Ira Levin outdid all of his peers with his invigoratingly elaborate 1978 stage play "Deathtrap" (which became a very good Lumet-directed movie starring Caine and Christopher Reeve), while Joe Camp ineptly parody the genre by reincarnating gumshoe Chevy Chase as crime-solving wonder-pooch Benji in "Oh! Heavenly Dog."

Camp's movie was an especially wrongheaded endeavor because, just four years earlier, the whodunnit had been spoofed in spectacularly funny fashion by one of the leading comedy writers of his day. It comes on like one of those Christie-inspired yarns, but tweaks the formula by being a sleuth flick about sleuths. For fans of the genre, this film is a must-see (save for one troubling element). It's called "Murder by Death."

After getting his start as a writer for the legendary (and still screamingly funny) NBC variety series "Your Show of Shows" in the 1950s, Neil Simon turned his hand to playwriting in the 1960s and became a one-man Broadway sensation. His plays "Come Blow Your Horn," "Barefoot in the Park," and "The Odd Couple" were long-running smashes, and were all turned into big-screen hits. The prolific Simon began skipping back and forth between theater and film, and, in the 1970s, knocked out some of his very best work for the latter medium. "The Heartbreak Kid" and "The Goodbye Girl" are absolute classics, but, in terms of pure laughs, the funniest thing he wrote during the decade was "Murder by Death."

The premise is simple: billionaire Lionel Twain (Truman Capote) invites six of the greatest sleuths in the world to solve a murder at his mansion – his murder (and his butler's) it turns out. The famous detectives include Sam Diamond (Peter Falk doing a riff on Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade from "The Maltese Falcon"), Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith as Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles from "The Thin Man"), Milo Perrier (James Coco as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot), Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester as Christie's Miss Marple) and Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers as Earl Derr Biggers' Charlie Chan).

Though theater veteran Robert Moore's direction is a little flat, the writing and the performances (including inspired turns from Alec Guinness and Nancy Walker) are aces. It's also a damn good mystery at its core, which adds to the whodunnit fun.

Alas, "Murder by Death" is also highly problematic due to Sellers' yellow-face portrayal of Wang. If you know Sellers' career well, you know he often trafficked in ethnic caricatures, and — judging from this, "Revenge of the Pink Panther" and the abominable "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu" — he really liked goofing on Asians. Please feel free to disagree with me, but I think "Murder by Death" is the least objectionable of Sellers' yellow-face performances because it's primarily a parody of Warner Oland's yellow-face portrayal of Charlie Chan from the 1930s. You're supposed to be laughing at the horridness of the racist caricature.

If you can't look past Sellers' Wang, I completely understand. It's unfortunate because the rest of "Murder by Death" is inoffensive silliness. It's currently available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV.