A Clue or Two

Video games are hardly my thing. Old-fashioned though it may be, I continue to be fond of board games, especially those that are clever or silly. From childhood onward, I’ve loved the Parker Brothers game, Clue. It was apparently devised in 1943 in Britain, where it was called Cluedo, and advertised as “The Great New Sherlock Holmes’ Game.” I don’t know the year of my parents’ set, the one I still have, but a note at the end of the instruction pamphlet politely tells the purchaser that “any question regarding the rules of ‘Clue’ will be answered gladly if a 3 cent stamp is enclosed.”

 Clue, for anyone who doesn’t know it, comes with a gameboard presenting the layout, room by room, of an English country manor. There’s a ballroom, a kitchen, a conservatory, a dining room, a billiard room, and a study, along with a few secret passageways. In my parents’ version, all these rooms are shown from above in sketch-like fashion: the billiard table once baffled me, and I decided it was a kind of very grand bathtub, with various round things floating in it. As a matter of fact there are no bathrooms at all in this stately home, nor bedrooms, for that matter. But we’re told that poor Mr. Boddy has been murdered. The job of the game players is to figure out (via the cards in players’ hands)  in which room the murder occurred, and with which weapon (a rope? a knife? a candlestick?) And of course, who was the murderer: the dashing Colonel Mustard? The glamorous Miss Scarlett? Wise old Professor Plum?  The dowager known as Mrs. Peacock? What I’ve discovered on the invaluable Wikipedia site is that the game has had many permutations over the years, with—for instance—England’s Reverend Green turning into a middle-aged businessman, then (in the most recent American editions) a handsome playboy. 

 I’ve been thinking about the game of Clue ever since I saw, this past summer, a presumably Broadway-bound production of a stage version that is both very silly and a great deal of fun, with lots of mistaken identity and an elaborate twist ending. This new play is an homage both to the game and to a movie that came out in 1985 and is still remembered fondly, at least by some. (Best in-joke in the play: as the characters are running madly from room to room in pursuit of the killer, someone says, “Who designed this house anyway? Answer: The Parker brothers.)

 That 1985 movie was blessed with a lively cast, including Eileen Brennan as Mrs. Peacock, Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White, Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum, Michael McKean as Mr. Green, Martin Mull as Colonel Mustard, and the toothsome Lesley Ann Warren as a no-better-than-she-should-be Miss Scarlett. (One of the film’s best mysteries: how does her VERY low-cut dress keep from falling down?) There’s also Tim Curry (he of the Rocky Horror Picture Show) as a complicated new character at the center of the plot. All seem to be having a grand old time spoofing the murder mystery films of yore. But there’s also a gimmick that sets Clue apart. Three different endings were filmed, each of which identifies a different murderer, with different methods and motives. Presumably, audiences were supposed to be so jazzed by the idea of seeing variant endings that they’d show up at the cinemaplex more than once. It didn’t happen, but when the film came out on video, all three endings were available to be seen. And some people now regard this crazy little flick as a cult classic. 

 

Solving the Mystery of Sherlock Holmes’ Little Sister

Until recently, all I knew of Millie Bobby Brown was her name. It’s an odd name, putting me in mind of someone living in a charming old farmhouse a few centuries back. Maybe, given her critical and popular success as a psychokinetic young girl on the series Stranger Things, it would be apt to think of that farmhouse as haunted.

 Millie Bobby Brown is sixteen years old. But unlike most sixteen-year-olds, she has just produced as well as starred in a new movie I’ve found genuinely enchanting. It’s Enola Holmes, based on a recent series of young-adult mysteries by Nancy Springer, who invented as her leading character a clever young sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, one who has her own gift for sleuthing her way through Victorian England. Frankly, I’d never heard of the series, but it clearly follows in the footsteps of the young-woman detective sagas of my youth. (There was the unstoppable Nancy Drew, of course, but my special favorite was a red-headed journalist named Beverly Gray who traveled the world solving mysteries while also landing scoops for her newspaper. No, I wasn’t named after her; my mother was terribly surprised to come upon a book titled Beverly Gray’s Romance while I was still in diapers. But I digress.)

 Enola Holmes, it seems, has been creatively raised in the English countryside by a strong but mysterious mother (Helena Bonham-Carter, no less) who likes to remind her that her first name, when read backward, spells “Alone” This seems pertinent when that mother suddenly disappears, leaving her clever, headstrong child to fend for herself. When her celebrated older brothers turn up to figure out how to solve the problem of Enola, they aren’t much help. The stuffy Mycroft’s goal is to send her off to a posh but sinister school for young ladies; Sherlock (played by the hunky Henry Cavill without any of the familiar Holmesian paraphernalia) seems more sympathetic to her situation, but is unwilling to give her the autonomy she craves.

 Eventually, she manages to get herself to London, meanwhile befriending a youthful aristocrat with problems of his own. As she searches for her lost mother and tries to keep the young Viscount Tewkesbury out of harm’s way, she is able to put to use various aspects of her singular education, including a familiarity with codebreaking, chess, and jiujitsu. This being a story pointed toward today’s young women, there’s no surprise that it contains a strong feminist point of view. I must say I rather enjoyed seeing Tewkesbury (who’s amiable and good-looking but not overly brave) repeatedly cower while Enola takes care of business.

 This film would not have succeeded so well without first-rate production values. There’s a lively score by David Pemberton and some charming visuals (paper cut-outs and such) used to bridge scenes and quickly provide information. But Enola Holmes is truly in the hands of Brown, with whom it’s easy indeed to fall in love. The script calls for her to speak, on many occasions, directly to the viewer, and her combination of girlish gusto and Sherlockian smarts proves irresistible. She also gets to wear disguises, transforming herself into everything from an elegant young sophisticate to a ragamuffin boy of the streets. She seems, all in all, to be having a wonderful time, which is why we can presuppose that there’s another Enola Holmes mystery waiting in the wings. The series was apparently brought to Brown by her older sister Paige, who shares a producer-credit with the young star. Hurrah for them both! It’s nice to see the future of cinema in good hands.

 

Old Folks’ Holmes: Sherlock Holmes and Other Old-Timers At the Movies

On a recent flight, I watched the 2011 film, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, on one of those tiny overhead screens. Robert Downey, Jr. certainly makes a most unusual Sherlock Holmes: the great detective as action hero. Anyone weaned on the old movies starring Basil Rathbone will immediately see the difference. Rathbone was tall, lean, and dapper, forever associated with an Inverness cape and deerstalker cap. Downey, some five inches shorter, is rumpled, burly, and sometimes bumbling. His disguises can be inept – as when he shows up in grotesque drag regalia – and he’s as prone to solve problems with a well-placed punch as with the cerebral cogitation for which the literary Holmes is so famous.

It was fascinating to see Downey’s take on Holmes (with its obvious appeal to the youth market) because I’d just finished reading a 2004 novella by Michael Chabon. The Final Solution, billed as “a story of detection,” moves Holmes into the twentieth century. The year is 1944, and the 89-year-old Holmes is living in retirement in the Sussex countryside, tending his bees as well as the demands of his aging body. He seems to be long past his years as a crime-solver, but the curious sight of a solemn young boy with a parrot walking on the railroad tracks near his home starts the old juices flowing. A murder and a kidnapping draw Holmes in, and soon he’s cautiously making his way to London to solve a case that’s unexpectedly tied to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

The Final Solution is a modest book, with not enough meat on its bones to be an obvious candidate for movie adaptation. (Chabon, much enamored of movies, has struggled to write a screenplay for his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.) What struck me about The Final Solution was its vivid depiction of old age. Chabon’s Holmes is not the cute codger of so much popular media. He’s the Conan Doyle original, but now bedeviled with physical frailty and an occasionally shaky grasp of the world. In the recent past, I’ve spent long hours with people of advanced years, and I appreciate Chabon’s respect for what the elderly can and can’t do.

Hollywood, of course, loves old coots, so long as they conform to certain stereotypes. Male actors like to sink their teeth into roles that let them be crusty and cantankerous but good-hearted: see Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino and Richard Farnsworth, the oldest ever Best Actor Oscar nominee for his role in The Straight Story. The classic old man of recent times is the one voiced by Edward Asner in Up. He’s grumpy but lovable, and ultimately rises above his condition (in quite a literal way) to take on the world. True, Meryl Streep won her latest Oscar for a portrayal of Margaret Thatcher that made old age look realistically daunting. But the British are especially fond of casting aging performers like Judi Dench and Maggie Smith in films (see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ) where they can ride motorcycles and perform youthful stunts for comic effect.

There’s an extreme example of adorable oldsters in Betty White’s newest TV venture, Off Their Rockers. The point of this Candid Camera-style reality show involves apparently feeble folk who succeed in punking our nation’s youth with their raunchy sensibilities and unexpected physical prowess (on skateboards and such). White, who acts as host, seems to find this naughty good fun. Personally, I like the idea of treating the elderly and their challenges with respect, rather than reducing then to Gen-Y'ers with wrinkles.