6 Reasons Why ‘Clue’ is the Best Movie Based on a Game of All Time.

AKA, The 40 Most Popular Board Games, According to Ranker – Part 8

Number 7: Clue
2,761 Positive Votes
2,601 Negative Votes

Clue is a game of deduction, via process of elimination. Discover the murderer, the murder weapon, and the room within which the victim was murdered.  Or guess wildly.  It usually won’t win you the game, but it sure pisses people off on the rare occasion you’re right.

But I don’t want to talk about ‘Clue: the Game’ today.  Because Clue holds a very important and unique distinction among games: a movie based on the game was made, and it is good.

No, no, not just good.  Clue is fun and inventive.  And sure, a 62% freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes isn’t something you’re supposed to brag about.  But compare that score to Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, which is often cited as the best video game movie of all time.  That movie received a freshness rating of 36% (The recent induction of Warcraft beat PoP in the box office for ticket sales, but continues the tradition with a freshness rating of 29%. [Whoops.  I missed Angry Birds on my first pass.  It’s currently sporting a 43% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  The best video game movie of all time, evidently, is about a flock of irate pigeons.] )

Why?  Why, out of all the games turned film, does Clue stand out as best?  I’ve got a good guess as to who did it, where they did it, and with what…

#1. The Score

John Morris’s score is both intriguing and intense.  He captures the pace and feel of a caper that is at once humorous and evocative before a single line of dialogue is spoken.  And all this while blending a full orchestra with a Moog synthesizer, like J.S. Bach at a disco roller rink.  The chilling crescendos are suspenseful.  The manic strings are fun.  But on occasion, the music breaks into the script and becomes the action, punctuating scenes in a living rendition of Looney Tunes, complete with a full accompaniment of cartoon mayhem.

#2. The All-Star Cast

Tim Curry and Christopher Lloyd don’t need an introduction.  They both get plenty of work despite the thirty years since this film’s release.  But the cast is simply brimming with comedic talent, and it’s clear that something magical is going on when Christopher Lloyd in his prime is the least interesting actor in the core cast.  Eileen Brennan (Private Benjamin), Michael McKean (This is Spinal Tap), Martin Mull (Martin Mull & His Fabulous Furniture in Your Living Room), and Lesley Ann Warren (Victor/Victoria) help round out a full gang of suspects.

Get back in your car, and drive away.

And then there’s Madeline Kahn.  The black widow Mrs. White is fascinating, helped along by a combination of strange ticks, curious micro-expressions, and a willingness to launch her way through otherwise unimpressive lines. Her ‘flames on the side of my face’ diatribe is the inspired invention of Kahn alone.

All of this spun from the throwaway line: “I hated her so much that I wanted to kill her.”  Even today, Kahn’s revenge fugue solidifies the concept of ‘a fury so deep it is inexpressible’ that it continues to be reiterated over and over again via meme.

Blatantly stolen from Travale’s DeviantArt page.

Scene after scene, Kahn’s burning gaze steals the viewer’s attention and drags them into world of dark innuendo.  No wonder she was a favorite of Mel Brooks, taking prominent roles in Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, and History of the World Part I.

But Kahn’s work is just a feature in a complex and tangled weave.  The ‘locked room’ nature of this movie’s mystery meant each player in the game is suspect for murder with both motive and means.  Consequently, each actor is given equal screen time in a shared space with a retinue of peers to bounce ideas off of.  The result is a bevy of solid performances combined with cutting dialogue straight out of the screwball era of comedy.  In fact, before filming, director Johnathan Lynn insisted on sitting down with his cast in the Universal lot to watch the movie His Girl Friday, hoping the cast would absorb the wise-cracking, rapid-fire repartee he aimed to replicate.  Eileen Brennan showed she understood what was wanted from her, and also that she was a perfect match for the brass that comes with her character, Mrs. Peacock; when the film was over she blurted out, “Well, you can tell this was before the Method. They just talked!”

#3. I Couldn’t Say Whether Clue Passes the Bechdel Test or Not, But It Does or Does Not Do So with Flying Colors

In the dining room scene, in which our protagonists make their introductions, Colonel Mustard declares his preference for the poetry of Rudyard Kipling with a quote: “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

The line serves two functions.  First, it shows us a glimpse into the mind of Mustard.  He starts his line with confidence, leading one to suppose Mustard is the kind of military commander that often quotes Kipling, perhaps as a way to commiserate over the whims of Mrs. Mustard with a brandy and a couple of likely chums.  Mustard finishes the quote, however, with trepidation as he ruminates over his position.  He doesn’t know why he was summoned to this house, or who his guests are.  Everyone is edgy.  Everyone is hiding something.  And considering the strange party he finds himself in, the quote he bandies as a joke—it might be true.  These women could be more dangerous than the men.

“That’s right!”

The Bechdel Test is used by moviegoers who lament the lack of strong female roles in major cinema.  All it takes for a movie to pass the test is for two women to have a conversation with each other, and that said conversation is not about a man.  It sounds like a simple goal, but according to bechdeltest.com, out of the 6,565 movies in their database, only 58% pass the test.  And that’s being very generous with a number of movies, where a single sentence can allow a positive score.

On bechdeltest.com, Clue is listed as passing the Bechdel test.  The core cast is 50% female, after all (if you count Yvette, the maid, who flits in and out of the plot.)  And the actresses do respond to things other actresses say.  But it’s a dubious honor, since the conversation is never between two women, so much as it’s between six to eight people all in the same room.  That, and when the players split into pairs to search the house, the writer/director chose to partner together male/female pairs only.  I know it sounds crazy, but this was probably done because of an unwritten rule in traditional comedy which posits that audiences “[don’t] want to see a sketch with two women.”  Don’t take my word for it.  Read Bossypants.  Tina Fey spends the better part of a chapter confronting this problem within the Second City Improv group in her memoir.

But let’s not quibble on the details.  One of the reasons why Clue works is because its cast is a diverse melange of comedy styles that clash well with one another.  That choice was in part forced by the design of Anthony E. Pratt’s original game.  Cluedo features six pawns—three male, three female.

Imagine that each of these characters is wearing a lycra full-bodysuit with a really long turtleneck.

But the script could have been written for the men to be dashing and/or villainous leads, while the women followed along like dopey soundboards to bounce lines off of.  That is how the majority of mystery/thrillers up to this point were written, after all.  Thankfully, Jonathan Lynn filled his movie with striking female personalities, and wasn’t afraid to let them perform.

Many modern movies still fail the Bechdel test, but the numbers are improving.  Maybe that’s because movies that pass the Bechdel test tend to make more money.  Go figure.  An audience of men and women would like to see movies about both men and women.  That’s one reason why Clue still holds up today.  Even if you don’t pick up on all the details in a movie, you still internalize them.  And for many classic movies, it might be hard to express why, but one can’t help but think that some ineffable human experience is missing.  You know.  Like all of the women.

#4. The Movie Is Performed In Miniature Within the Movie

“And Colonel Mustard sat here! And Mrs. White sat here!” “Get on with it!”

Just before the movie winds to a close, Wadsworth the butler, played by Tim Curry, declares that he solved the murders.  In order to explain why he knows what he knows, however, he must explain everything that’s happened so far this night.  Thus begins a manic tour de force as Curry tears through the script, jokes, physical comedy, and all, dragging the cast behind him.  Requiring a surrogate for the twice-murdered Mr. Body, Wadsworth trips Mr. Green, picks him up, knocks him down, pretends to pick up a candlestick, chases him into the hall and knocks him down again.

At this point a very furious Mr. Green gets up and yells “Will you stop that!”  To which Wadsworth says, “No.” and promptly tosses Green in the bathroom to simulate the murderer getting rid of the body.  The entire exposition, from beginning to end, is a nine and a half minute whirlwind of theater and an excellent example of what happens when you let a talent like Curry’s push above and beyond.

#5.  The Movie Doesn’t End When It Ends

Co-screen writer John Landis added a novel twist to Clue’s script.  Since the movie was based on a board game which could result in multiple different outcomes when played, Landis wrote Clue with a number of intentional holes in the plot which needed filling.  That way, multiple plausible endings could be filmed, each ending filling in a different niche in the narrative.  Each modular ending was then attached to the base film, and three separate films, each with a different ending, was sent to different theaters.  In Landis’s estimation, this would not only get people talking about the movie, but would also encourage people to watch his movie multiple times in multiple different theaters to see the different endings (it sure didn’t hurt that the fast clip narrative meant moviegoers would need  multiple viewings to catch all the little details in the dialogue.)

Landis’s clever idea backfired.  With modern movies, much of the profit is made on opening week.  But before the massive Hollywood buzz machine was in full swing, movies needed to build a reputation and gather ticket sales over an extended period of time to rake in a profit.  These second-wave moviegoers, however, caught wind of Clue’s multiple endings and decided against watching Clue altogether.  Why watch a movie that isn’t complete?  Must I watch the movie three times (or four times? or five times?  Without the Internet, no one had any way of knowing how many different endings there were) before I got the full experience?  Given a choice between watching a movie with no clear ending, or enjoying a reliable movie experience with a well received hit like Back to the Future or the Goonies, people chose the latter.

Clue wouldn’t find a proper audience until it appeared on home video and HBO.  Clearly, three different VHS tapes with three different endings would result in a lot of unhappy customers.  So all three endings were cut together into one extra long dénouement.  Here, Landis’s folly became a feature.  Viewers could watch the endings back to back and marvel at the plot’s fluidity.  Just like a real game of Clue, all the players were suspect until each card is accounted for in the end.

Since then, Clue received the label ‘cult classic’.  But I don’t think that name is appropriate.  Cult films, like the Rocky Horror Picture show, are aimed for a particular audience and don’t take off until that audience finds and adopts the movie.  Clue was a solid general audience movie.  The general audience simply chose not to watch it.  When people saw the movie in an environment where no commitment was demanded of them, they enjoyed it, and recommended it.

#6.  Clue Was Made Before Movies Based On Games Were Supposed To Be Bad

In 1985, movies based on games existed, but only in the abstract.  Cloak & Dagger, Tron, and The Last Starfighter were well-respected cinematic adventure flicks of their time.  WarGames is a cultural touchstone.  None of these movies were based on any single game, however.  Tron and Starfighter could be found in arcades, but the games were based on the movie, not the other way around.  Cloak & Dagger was intended to be released with a repurposed Atari 5200 game originally called ‘Agent X‘.  But the failure of the Atari 5200, and the video game crash of ’83 put an end to that plan.

Even in the fictional world of Cloak & Dagger, Atari 5200 cartridges were already plummeting in value.

Clue was a unique movie for its time in that it was based on a pre-existing game.  When it was released in 1985, it could only be compared to other movies based on the lives of gamers or on fictional games.  Those movies were good, so it was reasonable to presume that any game based on a pre-existing game would also be good.  Still, sales of tickets to Clue were low, so there was no ensuing mad rush to make movies about other game properties.  Then in 1993, Super Mario Bros. happened.  And all good faith in movies based on games was lost.

You know… rifles with scopes. Because Mario and Luigi spend so much time in the games shooting guns…

How bad was SMB?  Almost nobody involved in making the movie, including the writers and the husband and wife directing team, ever played the game.  Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo admitted to relying on heavy drinking to make it through the disaster which was their lives on set.  Once, in a drunken stupor behind the wheel of a van, Leguizamo slammed on the brakes, launching the van door forward and smashing Hoskins hand which was gripping the door frame.  For much of the rest of the movie, Hoskins arm was kept in a cast painted red and pink to blend in with his sleeve and hand.  An article in Spy magazine claimed that the script was re-written so often by studio executives, that actors stopped caring about the daily re-writes and winged their way through lines.  Nobody wanted to work on this movie.  Everyone involved wanted it to be over with.

“The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set!”

All in all, SMB was a terrible first step into video game franchise crossovers.  And perhaps the precedent could’ve been ignored if Street Fighter didn’t follow up with a potentially worse turkey, owing to a first time director’s inability to control his drug addicted star, or stop Capcom from flooding his movie with characters, watering down the plot into a soupy dreck.  Mortal Kombat fared better.  But the MK franchise is built on a premise of campy over-the-top violence, and the movie lived up to that expectation.  Negative reviews from stuffy film critics were meaningless to this franchise which soaked up ticket sales from fanboys at the box office equal to 675% of the film’s budget.  Movie executives took notice, and an expectation surrounded movies based on games.  The path to success could sometimes be shaky, but games provided untapped franchises with an automatic audience who were (now) equipped with low expectations.  The lesson learned was to stop trying so hard.  Game movies could be mass-produced with excellent returns, providing producers provided only the bare minimum support in order to rake in maximum gains.

Toasty!

Clue, however, was made before ‘franchise’ became a dirty word.  Before Hollywood plumbed games for movie tickets, they were dropping butts in seats throughout the 80s with movies based on popular television shows.  Dragnet, The Naked Gun, The Untouchables, The Twilight Zone, and Star Trek (okay, Star Trek II.  But the first movie’s heart was in the right place.) These successes proved you could build upon what’s already known about pre-established settings, and take advantage of the audience’s emotional attachment to the characters, in order to make an even better movie.  In the 80s, franchises were valuable property to be treated with respect.  It would take another decade for Hollywood to realize that respect wasn’t required for properties like The Beverly Hillbillies or Sgt. Bilko.  People were going to watch the movie based upon the franchise’s  previously built upon goodwill, even while that goodwill was being exploited.