Film Forum

U.S., 1973
Directed by Herbert Ross
With Richard Benjamin, James Coburn, James Mason, Dyan Cannon, Raquel Welch
Screenplay by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins.
Approx. 120 min. DCP.

“Perhaps they really did think they’d heard the last of Sheila. She was a gossip columnist who left a party early one morning (a little loaded, probably) and was walking down a street in Bel Air when she was killed by a hit-and-run motorist. But that was a year ago. So when her husband invites them all over to France for a week on his yacht, it sounds like fun, not a wake. There’s one little catch, though. It turns out that one of the cruise guests is the hit-and-run murderer. Sheila’s husband (James Coburn) knows who. But he isn’t after mere legal solutions. He wants sadistic revenge. So he plans a game, a very complicated game. He hands all of the guests typewritten cards with secrets on them. Not their own secrets; somebody else’s secrets. One of the guests is an alcoholic, one is a child molester, one was an informer during the witch-hunts. And so on. Every night there will be a hunt for clues onshore. Gradually everyone’s secret will be discovered. And Saturday night is set aside for the murderer.” – Roger Ebert

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