Taglines: Any number can play. Any number can die.
The Last of Sheila movie storyline. Sheila Green (Yvonne Romain) is killed in a hit-and-run car accident while walking home from a party one night. A year later, her multi-millionaire husband, Clinton (James Coburn), invites a group of friends (James Mason, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, Richard Benjamin, Joan Hackett, and Ian McShane) to spend a week with him on his yacht.
Clinton loves to play elaborate games and he assigns everyone a secret – one is an alcoholic, another an informer and so on – that they are not to share with anyone. Every day for the next six days, they will call into a port where they will be given clues to discover one person’s secret. The game takes a deadly twist when a murder tales place and it all has to do with the game they have been playing and the secrets that Clinton assigned at the outset.
The Last of Sheila is a 1973 American mystery film directed by Herbert Ross and written directly for the screen by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim. It starred Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, James Coburn, Joan Hackett, James Mason, Ian McShane, and Raquel Welch. The original music score was composed by Billy Goldenberg. The song “Friends”, sung by Bette Midler, can be heard during the final scene of the film and the end credits.
The movie was shot in the south of France. In an interview for a fortieth-anniversary screening of the film, Cannon said that filming on an actual yacht proved to be too difficult, and so production was halted, stranding the cast on location: “So we had to wait in the south of France while they built a set at the Victorine Studios [in Nice] for us. We had to spend our days lying on the beach and going to lunch and shopping. It was a hard job!”
The shoot was not easy; according to Dyan Cannon the first cameraman was fired and the yacht sank. This required reshooting early in the process. There were also complaints about Raquel Welch’s behaviour. In turn, she announced she was suing Herbert Ross for assault and battery as a result of an incident in her dressing room. She claimed she had to flee to London during the shoot “to escape physical harm”. However she then returned to Nice to shoot the film’s final scenes, although she was provided with a bodyguard. Warner Bros later issued a statement supporting Ross and criticising Welch for her “public utterances”.
James Mason told a newspaper at the time that Welch was “the most selfish, ill-mannered, inconsiderate actress that I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with.” Joel Schumacher worked on the film as costume designer.
About the Story
On a one-week Mediterranean pleasure cruise aboard the yacht of movie producer Clinton Greene (Coburn), the guests include actress Alice Wood (Welch), her talent-manager husband Anthony (McShane), talent agent Christine (Cannon), screenwriter Tom Parkman (Benjamin), Tom’s wife Lee (Hackett), and film director Philip Dexter (Mason).
The trip is, in fact, a reunion; with the exception of Lee (who was “sick of Santa Barbara”), all were together at Clinton’s home one year before, on the night a hit-and-run accident resulted in the death of Clinton’s wife, gossip columnist Sheila Greene. (Yvonne Romain, a former Hammer horror actress, appeared as Sheila Greene in a cameo performance.)
Once the cruise is under way, Clinton, a parlor game enthusiast, informs everyone that the week’s entertainment will consist of “The Sheila Greene Memorial Gossip Game.” The six guests are each assigned an index card containing a secret (in Clinton’s words, “a pretend piece of gossip”) that must be kept hidden 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 receives no points on Clinton’s scoreboard for that round. Following the revelation of the first card, “YOU are a SHOPLIFTER,” suspicion begins that each guest’s card does not contain “pretend” gossip but in fact an actual, embarrassing secret about each guest.
On the second day, Christine is nearly killed when someone (not revealed to the camera) turns the boat’s propellers on while she is swimming near them. The second game session takes place in an abandoned, derelict abbey during a thunderstorm, where the second card is revealed to be “YOU are a HOMOSEXUAL.” When Clinton does not return from the second evening’s installment of the game, the guests return ashore the following day and discover his corpse.
Although the group initially assumes that Clinton perished when a stone column collapsed during the storm, Tom points out several clues that suggest otherwise. The blood where Clinton was struck came from a stone at the bottom of a pillar, not the top, meaning it could not have fallen on him from a great height. Furthermore, a piece of wood landed in his jacket from where he was sitting earlier in the evening, implying he died there and was moved underneath the column. Finally, there was a burnt cigarette butt at his feet, despite Clinton being a non-smoker. Tom surmises that one of the six killed him where he sat, then dragged the body to one of the pillars and dropped a stone (mistakenly from the bottom of the column) on his head to make it seem like an accident.
Next, Tom reveals that his card reads, “YOU are a HIT-AND-RUN KILLER.” After getting everyone else to reveal their cards (the others are EX-CONVICT, INFORMANT and LITTLE CHILD MOLESTER), he confesses to having had an affair with Clinton, revealing himself to be the homosexual and suggesting that one of the secrets belongs to each of the others. It is implied that the hit-and-run killer murdered Clinton to conceal his or her guilt in Sheila’s death.
This begins a macabre game of musical chairs of sorts, with guests jousting over who lays claim to which dirty little secret. Eventually, it becomes clear that Christine was the informant, Alice the shoplifter, Anthony the ex-convict, and Philip the little child molester. Lee tearfully confesses to having killed Sheila while driving drunk the previous year, and having accidentally killed Clinton the previous night after he provoked her by blaming her for Sheila’s death. She locks herself in her cabin, and Tom is unsuccessful in reaching her. Shortly thereafter, she is found dead with her wrists slit, and the case seems to be closed.
On the final night of the cruise, the crew and most of the guests go to a party on the shore, but Philip, who brought no money, remains on the ship. Tom returns to find him thinking over loose ends of the earlier events. Philip experiments with stamping out cigarettes, speculating that it was Clinton who attempted to stamp out the cigarette but was unable to in the dark.
This further implies that he only had one try at it; Philip posits that, while he looked down and tried to put it out, the killer murdered him. Lee could not have killed him in this way, and therefore Philip suspects that Lee had “killed” a dead body. He further speculates that someone else – presumably the actual killer – stayed there after Lee fled and rearranged the scene to implicate her instead.
Finally, Philip realizes that the six clues (Shoplifter, Homosexual, Ex-convict, etc.) spell out “SHEILA,” and that a picture taken the first day has each of them standing under a letter of Sheila’s name that corresponds to their clue – except for the final “A”, which breaks the pattern. (The use of the acronym also explains the redundant “LITTLE” in Philip’s own clue; “CHILD MOLESTER” would have divulged Philip’s secret guilt well enough, but the “L” from “LITTLE” was necessary for the photograph.)
The Last of Sheila (1973)
Directed by: Herbert Ross
Starring: Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, James Coburn, Joan Hackett, James Mason, Ian McShane, Raquel Welch, Yvonne Romain, Pierre Rosso, Serge Citon, Elaine Geisinger, Elliot Geisinger
Screenplay by: Anthony Perkins, Stephen Sondheim
Production Design by: Ken Adam
Cinematography by: Gerry Turpin
Film Editing by: Edward Warschilka
Costume Design by: Joel Schumacher
Set Decoration by: John Jarvis
Art Direction by: Tony Roman
Music by: Billy Goldenberg
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: June 14, 1973
Visits: 249