It came to my attention only recently that there isn’t a single essay on this website about the 1985 film Clue—Clue, the ur-text for postmodern whodunnits, the consummate cult classic that gained an enormous throng of celebrants in the years since its release and subsequent critical evisceration.
“Critical evisceration” is putting it mildly. Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert said “fun, I must say, is in short supply in ‘Clue.’” Kevin Thomas, of The Los Angeles Times, wrote: ‘Clue’ needs all the splash and gimmickry it can get… it’s no more satisfying as a comedy than it is as a mystery.” In her fabulous 2019 retrospective on the film in the magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room, Julia Selinger acknowledges the unavoidable aspect of the film that contributed to its unilaterally negative critical consensus: “is there,” she asks, “a title card more damning than ‘Based upon the Parker Brothers’ Board Game?’”
Indeed, in The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote “Like the board game on which it is based, the movie ‘Clue’ is most fun in its early stages.” In The Washington Post, Paul Attanasio suggested audiences should “leave it with one conviction: stick with the game.” And Ebert began his review with the postulation: ‘Clue’ is a comedy whodunit that is being distributed with three different endings, which is sort of silly, since it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference who did it. That makes the movie a lot like the board game which inspired it, where it didn’t make any difference either, since you could always play another game.”
These reviewers’ comparing the film to the board game all make Selinger is correct in her assessment; the adaptive framework of Clue doesn’t bode well for a rich cinematic existence. There is no narrative in a board game, even Clue, which offers a stronger inciting incident than most: a man is found dead in his grand mansion, and one of his six guests must be his killer. Clue the movie is pulled in two directions, trying to be a pastiche and a genuine innovation: a madcap whodunnit spoof (à la Neil Simon’s Murder by Death, a decade prior) and a literal board game come to life.
The thing is, and I don’t say this often, I do think that in this instance, the critics may have missed the point.
Not entirely, though… it is this latter element of the film (the board game come to life) that all its contemporary critics found both equally vexing and ingenious. The film, written and directed by Johnathan Lynn, features three different endings. Three different outcomes to the mystery, just as is possible in the board game. There is no motive in the board game, so one must be supplied for the film to have any meaning. That is, if it strives for meaning. It doesn’t. Instead, it embraces the randomness of a shuffled card deck, offering three random endings that might satisfy the clues in the story as well as the next.
This is what Ebert in referencing in the aforementioned quote, the start of his review of the film—an element that, on its own, he found brilliant. “The way Paramount is handling its multiple endings,” he wrote, “is ingenious. They’re playing each of the endings in a third of the theaters where the movie is booked. If this were a better movie, that might mean you’d have to drive all over town and buy three tickets to see all the endings.” He concludes, though, “[w]ith ‘Clue,’ though, one ending is more than enough.”
But he was correct in finding creative merit in this aspect of Clue. Writing in 2021, the scholar Milan Terlunen noted that “Clue lays bare the inner workings of all detective stories. Clue‘s multiple endings aren’t just a clever cinematic translation of the board game’s structure — they reveal something crucial about the nature of clues in general.” He goes on to explain that the very point of “solving” a mystery is “the process of distinguishing clues from red herrings… [t]here’s always too much evidence in a detective story, which fits beautifully with the general too-muchness of Clue.”
To wit, a frequently-uttered joke in the very Cold-War-preoccupied Clue is the line “communism was just a red herring!”—which refers to the many, many would-be conspiracy theories that pepper the detective work of Clue, just as much as it speaks to UAAC and the American communist paranoia of the actual Cold War, a period in our recent history of rampant speculation and accusation founded on nothing concrete, at all.
With sly little nods like this, I think the point of Clue is to point out that there’s rarely ever a mystery at all. At least, not in real life. The goofy, madcap aesthetic of Clue is the outfit for a whodunnit, because whodunnits don’t actually exist. This reminds me of Season One of the extraordinary satire-mystery show Search Party, in which [spoiler] a few bored millennials suspect that they are in a whodunnit and start finding clues… and then realize eventually that everything that seems like a clue is in fact a red herring, and there is no mystery at all. Search Party ostensibly takes place in real life, where there are no mystery-like mysteries at all.
The fun of Clue is its existence as a playground, where the absurdities of one of our culture’s favorite genres are laid bare. The plot is, as in the board game, simple. Six random guests receive an invitation to attend a dinner party at a remote mansion. We find out quickly that their colorful names are all proscribed aliases, and they must keep their real identities a secret. They—Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn), Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull), Mr. Green (Michael McKean), Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan), Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd), Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren)—meet their host (who we find later has been blackmailing them all, for a long time). Their host, Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving, of the punk band Fear, quickly dies), though, meaning that the six strangers, the butler Wadsworth (Tim Curry), the maid Yvette (Colleen Camp), and the cook (Kellye Nakahara) are all equal possible culprits. The police are called, but with a murderer on the loose in the house, everyone takes it upon themselves to try to solve the crime.
There are no butler, no maid, no cook in the game (besides Mrs. White maybe, who is sometimes dressed in a chef’s hat). There’s more of everything in Clue: more characters, more rooms, more weapons, more madness. The tagline of the film is: “it’s not just a game anymore,” which is brilliant. It’s true, it’s not just a game, not by a long shot… there’s too much new stuff in there now. But it’s also still a game.
The thing about Clue that separates it from whodunnits lies in this term. Clue is a game the way “red rover” and “dodgeball” are games. It’s not a puzzle. Don’t try to solve it. Just have fun.
