For once in Bad Movies We Love history, I'm both speechless and teary-eyed. The holiday season is here, and as far as I'm concerned, that means it's time to wheel out the movies that are fucking dependable -- the ones that enrich our families, provide nourishment for our newborns, and encourage Jesus to be more of a hilarious character actress. For me, this means one movie -- my favorite movie -- and one that could be considered bad if you are a heartless, freakish, braindead moviegoer who thinks that skittish ensemble comedies based on board games might be stupid. I would strangle those people in a poorly lit billiard room. The movie is Clue, it's the one thing on Earth I'm positive I love, and I want to hug you as I write this. Girl, let's hold our candlesticks high, our dignities low, and bludgeon the daylights out of Mr. Boddy.
Where to begin, darlings? Even in terms of campy, overpopulated '80s comedies, Clue is an anomaly. It resembles the (pretty unwatchable) Peter Sellers murder mystery Murder By Death in appearance and tone -- and Eileen Brennan flaps about in both -- but Clue defies the familiar whodunit genre with three strange attributes:
1. A rigid adherence to the characters, gameplay, and vaguely glamorous world inside Clue's 2-D mansion;
2. An excess of jokes concerning Communism, J. Edgar Hoover, and shady politicians of the 1950s;
3. A cast that is trying so hard to sell every one-liner, aside, and petty plot machination that we see steam fly up from Lesley Ann Warren's décolletage every four minutes.
For a frothy mystery comedy, it is deeply labored effort. I can't gauge how or if a first-time viewer will appreciate the charismatic brio I so deeply cherish here. In fact, to an amateur, Clue may just seem like a barrage of underwritten jokes.
But I don't care. I am an indoctrinated attendee in Clue's sprawling manor, and I can't limit myself to choosing five fabulous parts of the movie. Since I ruined your life last week with Who's That Girl, I'll edify you with a lengthier tribute to Clue's greatness. I'm picking its 25 most amazing moments. You can't stop me -- not with your revolver, your Jell-O rendering of Colleen Camp, or your Academy Award nomination for Private Benjamin. Sit back and giggle at the splendor.
(I realize that some of this won't make sense to first-timers, but please just let me freestyle here. True Clue lovers can't blather enough about their adoration. Spoilers everywhere.)
25. The absolute lamest joke about Communism possible -- repeated twice.
Allow Miss Scarlet (the ravishing, Oscar-nominated Sarandon doppelganger Lesley Ann Warren) to define Communism for you. Pretty fishy!
24. The shamelessly hacky plot
For the uninformed: Clue is about the game's six familiar characters (Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum, etc.) who are invited to a dinner party. Their host Wadsworth (Tim-effing-Curry) introduces them to a man named Mr. Boddy, who Wadsworth reveals is blackmailing all of them. Boddy turns up dead. Then other peripheral characters turn up dead. Wadsworth solves the murders and begins to explain how he figured them out. Then the movie treats us to -- pay attention now -- three separate endings, each with a different explanation for the 6-7 murders that occur in the mansion. Vamping and jokes ensue. Credits. It's "Choose Your Own Adventure" for an Agatha Christie crowd. You're hooked or you're not a person.
23. Unnecessarily fantastic and nonsensical cameo #1: A character from Madeline Kahn's past
Wadsworth, in the throes of explaining how each of the murders occurred in ending #3, accuses the dark and mysterious Mrs. White of strangling Yvette the maid. He declares, "You were jealous that your husband was schtupping Yvette -- that's why you killed him, too!" The word "schtupping" is no accident. Madeline Kahn earned her second Oscar nom for playing Lili von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles. And Clue, of course, knows that you know that. Because it loves us.
22. Mr. Boddy is played by a notorious SNL musical guest.
Lee Ving, the aptly monikered actor who plays Clue's famously offed victim, possesses a hotheaded, Sean Penn-adjacent grit as Mr. Boddy. Indeed, he's a true showbiz rioter: As the lead singer of the L.A. punk outfit Fear, Ving led a Saturday Night Live musical performance that devolved into audience stage-diving and thrashing. Producer Dick Ebersol stopped the performance midway through and cut to a pre-taped rehearsal performance in its place. That's about as rock n' roll as Clue gets. Because ahem:
21. The soundtrack -- for white people who love white people who rip off black people
Clue is set in 1954 New England, and the hilariously pre-Elvis soundtrack reflects that. The two key records playing throughout the manor are Bill Haley and the Comets' tidy rendition of Big Joe Turner's much more libidinous "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" and the white doo-wop group the Crew Cuts' version of The Chords' "Sh-Boom." Go back to the Delta and whine about it, black innovators! The whites are loving their un-syncopated good times. Shake it, Yvette.
20. Good news: Slapping women in the face is still funny.
Cue my favorite scene from Muppets From Space, because here's another movie where a squealing women gets decked. Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan) throws a screamy tantrum when Professor Plum (Chrostopher Lloyd, who had a very productive 1985) suggests that her brandy is poisoned. A heretofore calm Mr. Green slaps the daylights out of her, stunning the room. I LOL every time at the overblown foley art that accompanies the violence. Like a hard uppercut from Street Fighter II.
19. Professor Plum's necrophiliac tendencies
Professor Plum outs himself as a perverted psychotherapist who beds his patients, but he's even freakier than he lets on: After the mansion's cook is found stabbed to death in the kitchen, Plum helps move her body to a couch in the study. After he positions her, he finds himself stuck with his hand on her rather zaftig fanny. And he digs it. Sigh. Go on, Clue. Be that weird.
18. Mr. Green's frank homosexuality
Michael McKean, the august Christopher Guest comrade (and fine Twitterer!), appears as the neurotic and accident-prone Mr. Green, who reveals that Mr. Boddy is blackmailing him for being gay. His straightforward acknowledgement of his gayness ("I must keep it a secret or I will lose my job on security grounds. Thank you.") is atypical of funny '80s cinema -- though in that regard, it belongs in the same category as Lesley Ann Warren's other awesome movie, Victor/Victoria.
17. Unnecessarily fantastic and nonsensical cameo #2: WKRP in Cincinnati's Howard Hesseman
Dr. Johnny Fever appears as a door-to-door pamphleteer who warns of Armageddon -- before revealing himself to be an FBI agent at movie's end. If Clue were filmed in 2005 instead of 1985, he would be played by approximately Eugene Levy.
16. There's some pretty decent dude-slapping too.
Take that, fruity Green!
15. The replication of the Clue mansion's impossible architecture
It's bold for a movie jam-packed with dialogue, whizzbang, and redundant monologues to find time to appease gaming purists, but Clue works overtime here. Not only are the all of the rooms and weapons from the board game accounted for, but the house's secret passageways are exactly the same -- the kitchen is connected to the study, and the lounge is connected to the conservatory. Clue sacrifices spatial believability to mimic the game's convenient room-jumping loophole. That's called integrity, lambs.
14. Wadsworth's definition of a butler's duties
"I buttle, sir." Well, then.
13. Awww, they're all murderers.
I've heard people claim that Clue's first ending, with Scarlet as the killer, is the most satisfying, but it's just not feasible that one person could be responsible for a half-dozen deaths under one roof. And Clue is definitely all about representing reality, so I'm right. I prefer the splashy third ending with Wadsworth unmasked as the true Mr. Boddy, everyone going to jail for committing various murders, and Mr. Green tying up the movie with a cheeky bon mot about the laughable concept of heterosexuality. You sleep with that wife, Mr. Green! Annette O'Toole, you revel in Mr. Green's secret machismo!
12. The funniest shower sequence since at least Carrie.
In the blacked-out mansion, Wadsworth races to restore power to the house. He tries a few knobs, ends up in a space he doesn't recognize, and turns the knob. Oh, oops. It is a shower. But Wadsworth has a silly accent and goes deadpan when humiliated, so it's hilarious when he's doused. Clue logic is real logic. Towel off and go with it.
11. Give it up for the underappreciated befuddlement of Martin Mull!
Sabrina the Teenage Witch hero Martin Mull plays Colonel Mustard as a selfish man-child who also has a dirty past as a war profiteer. That's fun enough, but Mustard's moments of sheer idiocy are even more delightful. Example: He quizzes Wadsworth, "Are you trying to make me look stupid in front of the other guests?" Wadsworth replies, "You don't need any help from me, sir." Mustard instinctively replies, "That's right!" The timing is spot-on, the dialogue is primed, and the Mustard is spicy.
10. Genuine scares!
No one will admit this, but Clue whips up a couple of real frights amid all the snapdragon-y dinner theater. When one of the guests sneaks through a secret passageway and throttles a visiting motorist with a wrench, you're witnessing a death sequence worthy of... you know, a decent PBS costume drama. You know how frightening those are. Particularly if you're a 136-year-old woman like I am.
9. Unnecessarily fantastic and nonsensical cameo #3: The Go-Gos' Jane Wiedlin
The quirky, loopy Jane plays a singing telegram girl who becomes the movie's final victim. She also knows pertinent information about Professor Plum -- but unfortunately, death seals her lips forever.
8. An inevitably dorky Gone with the Wind throwback
You can smell it coming during the opening credits, and it doesn't land until deep into the third act. When Miss Scarlet begs for forgiveness from the sleuthing Wadsworth, he responds, "Frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn." Rhett Butler? More like Riot Butler! It's this cheesiness that defines my Mariana Trench-deep obsession with Clue. I was LOLivia de Laugh-illand just now. See? I was made for this movie.
7. What the hell is with Yvette's death monologue?
I know Clue backwards and forwards, but the one moment that still confounds me is Yvette's (Colleen Camp, of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, silly) final words to her hiding killer. I'm glad this bothers me, because I like having reasons to think about Clue in the middle of a random Wednesday without provocation. She speaks with a French accent throughout the movie, is exposed as a madam in Miss Scarlet's secret business, and right as she's about to get murdered we hear her explain that someone in the house recognized her from her naughty night job: "They must have. And not just my face. They know every inch of my body. And they're not the only ones..." What? Why would she have to reiterate that "they're not the only ones" if the killer already knows she's a prostitute? Someone explain this to me, please, with a comically dimwitted French accent. Sidenote: The rope in Clue is faaaaabulous.
6. Sincerely bad-ass opening credits and music
The quaint, but spooky opening calls of the Clue theme tuck us in for a night of suspicious behavior and color-coordinated characters. You're aware from those jaunty tones that B-list character actors of the '80s will be quipping and quarreling to save their lives here. I always get up and perform a fancy-footed tarantella during the opening sequence and call myself "Lieutenant Lavender." Hopefully you've stopped reading at this point and didn't notice I said that.
5. Killing husbands is so tiring.
Traditionally in the Clue game, Mrs. White is depicted as the house's maid. Since Yvette has those duties covered, Madeline Kahn is allowed to create an entirely original character -- a dour, monotone woman cloaked in funeral blacks whose dead husbands seem to pile up like blackmail payments. Mrs. White calmly explains her theory on the opposite sex: "Husbands should be like Kleenex: soft, strong, and disposable." Better yet, she explains the untimely demise of her third husband, an illusionist who vanished: "He wasn't a very good illusionist." Don't pretend that's an easy joke. Oscar Wilde would've gladly shoehorned that into The Importance of Being Earnest. Respect.
4. Mrs. Peacock's feathered battiness
Mrs. Peacock is both a nutty windbag and a cool sociopath -- but it's the former attribute that makes her magical. As she introduces herself during dinner in the dining room, she spits out a three-octave, nonsense soliloquy that a flailing protagonist in a Brecht play might proclaim before committing suicide. "Oh my! This SOUP's delicious, isn't it?" is the perfect way to end any uninteresting anecdote.
3. Lesley Ann Warren is as brassy as that candlestick
Little-known fact: Lesley Ann Warren was a last-minute addition to the Clue cast. Originally Carrie Fisher was slated for the role, but she backed out at the last minute to attend rehab for her "hay fever" (as director Jonathan Lynn once put it). No offense to Leia, but Lesley Ann Warren is simply unforgettable as the alpha-tough, intermittently histrionic Scarlet who runs a prostitution ring for kicks. Scarlet's like if Heidi Fleiss were fucking awesome. I'll give you a few hours to think about what that might be like. Hint: She'd certainly say things like, "I enjoy getting presents from strange men."
2. Tim Curry's indefatigable emceeing
The other characters bop about amiably in Clue, but Tim Curry is the movie's irreplaceable foundation as Wadsworth. Not only does he move the plot along as the "game's" moderator, but he interjects with enough remarks about Communism, Socialism, infidelities, crime, luridness and sheer fun to put Dr. Frankenfurter's gusto to shame. Can we compare Tim Curry cult phenomena for just a second? I vote that Clue destroys Rocky Horror. Brazenly dorky ensemble comedies that make sense always win over brazen dorky ensemble comedies that you have to throw food at. Barry Bostwick, stand down.
1. Madeline Kahn's greatest onscreen moment -- a total ad-lib.
Perhaps you've adored Madeline Kahn in a number of her great films, like Young Frankenstein, Paper Moon, or High Anxiety. But I doubt you can say the legendary, and very, very dearly departed actress has had a better moment than when she confesses to killing Yvette the maid. In one sublime monologue, Kahn -- looking like either MadTV's Ms. Swan as portrayed by Linda Hunt -- chirps her wacky motivation for strangling the busty maid. This monologue should be studied as a Dada art installation. Words fail me. But Clue never, ever will.
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