Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Let's be realistic.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

No need to recap the plot. Beneath all the glitz, snappy one-liners, and Hollywood insider jokes lurks a turgidly told whodunit that only a Rosetta Stone could untangle. Moreover, whoever edited that hodgepodge of flashbacks should take a refresher course in Charlie Chan, guaranteeing that the several clever clue ideas finally get proper treatment. In fact the entire 2-hour script could use a slimming-down. At the same time, the many narrative defects suggest an OJT effort by actor Perkins and composer Sondheim minus professional supervision. Either that or director Ross was doing his own OJT.The whodunit may be impossible, but the movie still has fun parts. The cast is clearly amused with the suggestive characters and provocative one-liners. Also, the Riviera setting amounts to real candy for the eye, along with many bikinis for the guys. On a more poignant note is Joan Hackett who here, as elsewhere, projects an effortless depth perfectly suited to her part-- what a loss that she died so young. Anyway, the mystery part may flounder, but the peek into colorful show-biz types succeeds. My advice -- go with the People magazine parts and let Sherlock Holmes sort out the rest.

"The Last of Sheila" is a '70s whodunit written by, of all people, Tony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim. And they did a good job! The film stars James Coburn, Dyan Cannon, James Mason, Joan Hackett, Raquel Welch, Ian McShane, and Richard Benjamin. The film begins with a woman, Sheila, who is married to Clinton Green (Coburn), running away from a party and being killed by a hit and run driver. A year later, Green assembles the party guests on a yacht in order to expose the killer. In order to do this, he has set up a deadly game.Well-directed by Herb Ross, "The Last of Sheila" is a highly entertaining film about a bunch of unpleasant people, and it's done with some dark humor. All the actors do a great job. It was wonderful to see the late Joan Hackett once again and to remember how handsome Ian McShane was when he first started out. Coburn and Cannon have the most flamboyant characters - Coburn is mean-spirited and manipulative, and Cannon as a Hollywood agent is a talkative bitch.Besides the clever plot, one learns a couple of things from this film. First of all, Raquel Welch looked the same in 1973 as she does now, go figure. And secondly, the costumes were done by Joel Shumacher, so now we know where our big wheelers and dealers in Hollywood come from.Really a must see - who knew that Stephen Sondheim is not only a brilliant composer and lyricist, but a scriptwriter as well? He wrote this with the late Tony Perkins, a marvelous actor who also seems to have been a man of many talents.

***SPOILERS*** Obsessed in finding his wife Shelia's, Yvonne Romain, killer big time Hollywood film producer Clinton Green, James Coburn, concocts this game that he plans to invite all those, at the party that he threw a years ago in Bel Air, to play whom he suspects, in a drunken hit-and-run accident, killed his wife Shelia. Shelia was killed walking home when she left the party after a fight with her husband Clinton.Invited on Clinton's yacht the "Shelia" on a cruse in the Mediterranean the six guests are given slips of paper that has something that they did in the past that they would rather forget about. One of those slips identifies the person who ran down Shelia, Hit-and-Run Driver, but it's up to the game that Clinton dreamed up to find out which one of the six that person is! Clinton's game does uncover a shoplifter in the bunch in sexy B-movie actress Alice Green, Raquel Welsh, which has the person who killed Shilia start to get nervous in that the cagey and clever that Clinton eventually will expose her or him by the time the one week cruse is over.***SPOILERS*** It's when the yacht docks at the deserted Catholic Church on the Isle of Saint Pierre that this seemingly harmless parlor game turns deadly for Clinton who up until then thought he was in control of events in the movie. It's then that we in the audience as well as Clinton realize that he totally miscalculated in exposing Sheila's killer by setting himself up to be murdered by someone who had nothing at all to do with her death. But in fact had it in for him for years and used Clinton's birdbrain game of whodunit as cover in order to, with an icepick, ice him!Released over year before the very similar and far more popular "Murder on the Orient Express" the movie "The Last of Shelia" is far more interesting in the many twists and turns in it that not only uncover the hit-and-run killer but activate an entire out of blue murder that really, if you think about it, had nothing to do with Clinton Green's plans. Being the egomaniac that he was Clinton overlooked that unlike his wife Shelia who was accidentally killed by a drunk driver he was targeted right from the start by one of his guests to be murdered whom, unlike the person who killed his wife, was just itching for the chance to do him in! And it was the clueless Clinton Green who gave that person all the rope he needed to do it with!

The Last of Sheila, a star-packed murder mystery written by Broadway legends, really doesn't start or even progress with much momentum at all, but when the true wheels of the actual murder puzzle start turning, it pulls a lot of palpable tension and sharp dialogue out of nowhere and does the job. It doesn't help that first half that I was tempted to turn it off, but the fact that the intrigue ratcheted up at the precise moment when I was going to is what saved it by a hair's breadth. And I'm glad I stuck it out. It proved itself worthwhile.The movie comes out of a fine heritage of murder puzzles from such as Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith. In fact, it's a little rare to see this material showing up first as a movie. It feels like the sort of story that would start life as a play. Bringing seven people together and then doing the old "one of the people sitting here amongst us is a murderer" schtick is inherently stagy. Nevertheless, it functions well as a movie, perhaps since the screenplay has as much to do with characters as with crime. The movie was written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, and they flaunt an apparent sense of showbiz manners and dialogue. They've also play Name That Tune with us: We can enjoy speculating who the bitchy agent was motivated by, or the director on the skids, or the centerfold, each played respectively by Dyan Cannon, James Mason and Raquel Welch, two out of three of whom kept me watching purely just to watch.I like the concept of a murder mystery set among showbiz types because Hollywood is often thought to be shy about death and shrink from it. Genuine sorrow seems quite rare. The movie opens as a watchful-waiting stratagem concerning Coburn and the killer, which is latently intriguing though it rambles too far away from the point of tension and plays more like a '60s romp than an expository double-blind. Yet it makes a striking hairpin halfway through. And it actually is a game to them; they don't spend time mourning when somebody dies, just clean up the blood and tally one more loser against their competition for a win. And yet it's barely started until just two of these characters spend a great deal of time deliberately hammering out the true significance of the clues, a scene so tight, well-acted, well-written and loaded with sharp wit that it makes the whole package worth it.A better part of the performances are pointed and mercenary, and very good, particularly James Mason with his typical cultured obstinacy. Dyan Cannon as the agent. Joan Hackett is beautiful and tender, and Richard Benjamin treads a fine line between voice of reason and a screenwriter trying to think in formulas. Coburn is always entertaining owing to his sheer presence and it's interesting watching an Ian McShane so much younger than anyone my age is aware he ever was. Welch is quite wooden by comparison, but as I said before