The Last of Sheila
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The Last of Sheila is a 1973 film directed by Herbert Ross, written by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, and starring Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, James Coburn, James Mason, Ian McShane, Joan Hackett, and Raquel Welch.
SPOILER WARNING
The plot involves a one week pleasure cruise aboard the yacht of movie producer Clinton Green (Coburn). The guests include a B-movie actress (Welch), her manager/boyfriend (McShane), an agent (Cannon), a struggling writer (Benjamin), his homely wife descended from Hollywood royalty (Hackett), and a has-been director (Mason). The event is, in fact, a reunion. All were together one year before, on the night Clinton's wife, gossip columnist Sheila Green, was killed in a hit-and-run accident.
Once the cruise is under way, Clinton, a well known parlor game enthusiast, informs that the week's entertainment will consist of "The Sheila Green Memorial Gossip Game." The six guests are each assigned a business card containing a secret ("a pretend piece of gossip") that each must hide from the others. The object of the game is to discover everyone else's secret while protecting one's own. Each night the yacht anchors at a different Mediterranean port city, where one of the six secrets is disclosed to the entire group. The guests are given a clue, then sent ashore to find the proof of who among them holds the card bearing that night's secret. The game for that night ends when the actual holder of the subject secret discovers the proof. Anyone who has not yet solved the clue is shut out for that round.
Following the revelation of the first card, "You are a SHOPLIFTER," members of the company grow uneasy and suspect that each guest's card does not contain a "pretend piece of gossip," as suggested by Clinton, but in fact an actual, embarrassing secret of another guest.
Clinton does not return from the second evening's installment of the game. The guests return ashore to the scene of the "proof" and discover Clinton's corpse. While waiting for authorities, one of the guests reveals that his card reads, "You are a HIT-AND-RUN KILLER." The remainder of the film involves a macabre Musical Chairs of sorts, with the characters jousting over who lays claim to which dirty little secret and growing increasingly paranoid over the obvious implication that both Sheila and Clinton were killed by somebody in the room.
The film is brilliantly crafted, both in its writing and direction. The game the characters play is actually just a portion of a more elaborate puzzle created by Clinton, such that additional clues are ever-present and any guest could win the game without even leaving the yacht. "If you're smart enough," Clinton taunts. Although the game ends prematurely due to Clinton's death, characters continue to discover these additional clues which point to who really killed Clinton and why.
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