Has Anyone Seen "The Last of Sheila"- Page 2

[Marquise]

Posted: 6/21/05 at 9:36am

your point is you have none and you should do something a little more constructive than following me around this board.

[nmartin]

Posted: 6/21/05 at 9:46am

The trail has gone cold. Marquise has crossed the river.

[OtherDaryl]

Posted: 6/21/05 at 10:20am

Well worth a watch - it is a gi-normous puzzle - a big word game disguised as a murder mystery, and the structure is very much lifted from Agatha Christie. If you enjoy Sleuth, you should enjoy Sheila. The performances are priceless, the locations gorgeous and it is funny to boot (both intentionally and unintentionally). I can only imagine the fun Mssrs. Sondheima and Perkins had writing this.

[Marquise]

Posted: 6/21/05 at 10:23am

Thank you so much for your educated post. It was much appreciated OtherDaryl. I will be picking this up.

[OtherDaryl]

Posted: 6/21/05 at 6:26pm

You are welcome and I do hope you enjoy!

[MrMidwest]

Posted: 6/21/05 at 9:56pm

I like Last of Sheila, too.

I also enjoyed Orient Express and Death on the Nile. Mia Farrow was a delight in the latter. "Swore to be true to each other, he was her man, but her was doin' her wrong!"

[romantico]

Posted: 7/18/07 at 8:38pm

I decided to bump this because its one of my all time favorite movies. I am fascinated with the behind the scene stories about this. Anthny Perkins and Stephen Sondheim would write these mysteries and invite friends like Roddy McDowall and Herbert Ross to these elaborate dinner parties and scavenger hunts. Man, I wish I would have been around back then.

The New Yorker ran an article on March 8th 1993 which they have recently posted in their online edition. ‘Stephen Sondheim's most famous game took place in Manhattan on Halloween, 1968. It required twenty people (preferably young theatre Turks like Herbert Ross, Nora Kaye, Lee Remick, Mary Rodgers, and Roddy McDowall), four limousines, complicated maps full of numbers and arrows, and a sack of perplexing props: scissors, bits of string, pins. Each team of five had to drive to a spot designated on the map, and there they would find a clue telling them where to go next; the trouble was, the clues were numbers, and there was no way of knowing how they might be revealed. One destination was a bustling bowling alley in which the last lane was curiously empty; there stood a single enigmatic pin, which you had to bowl over in such a way that you glimpsed the number written on the side. Another site proved to be nothing but a nondescript door with a mail slot. But if you stuck your ear near the slot, you could hear the faint voice of Frank Sinatra singing "One for My Baby" - which might still have stumped you unless you recognized that the lyric begins, "It's a quarter to three." A quarter to three: the number was 245. Then there was the vestibule of a brownstone, where a small elderly woman (actually, the mother of Anthony Perkins, Sondheim's fellow game designer) would beckon you upstairs for some coffee and a slice of cake. Those who actually ate the cake stood no chance of winning: the clue was drawn in the icing.

"That was one of the last of the big game parties," Sondheim says. "Toward the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies, I don't knowóit just stopped. Everybody outgrew them except me." When you enter his five-story town house in midtown Manhattan, the first thing you notice, besides an enormous black poodle named Max, is his antique-game collection: on the walls, in glass museum cases, on various low tables. Most of the items look faintly sinister: here is something called Schimmel, or Ball and Hammer and here an inscrutable British concoction, Squails, and, behind the sofa, his earliest acquisitionóthe ghastly New and Fashionable Game of the Jew, a dice game devised in 1811 that, according to Sondheim, "taught kids to be anti-Semitic. But all the games you see here are very nice to look at and real boring," he adds. "This thing about games - I'm not really fascinated with games."

http://www.sondheim.org/php/news.php?id=450

Updated On: 7/18/07 at 08:38 PM