Murderous Mirth
Stage Struck by Simon Gray
Theatre Royal, Bath, 1995
On the face of it, a comedy thriller might seem a contradiction in terms. Can a thriller really be funny as well? Can a comedy really thrill?
John Willard’s The Cat and the Canary (1922) was one of the first to attempt the trick, and after more than seventy years it remains a classic of the genre. Humour and thrills were nicely balanced and although when the play was filmed as a vehicle for Bob Hope the jokes were expanded (“Don’t great empty houses scare you?” the bright-eyed ingénue asks him. “Not me, I used to play vaudeville.”), it was still spooky enough to justify the famous line, “Even my goose pimples have goose pimples.”
The success of The Cat and the Canary launched a flood of thrillers which lasted throughout the twenties and well into the thirties, and established a trend for remote gloomy houses as the most popular and appropriate setting for the gruesome goings-on. But whereas the situations and characters in Willard’s play (with the exception, perhaps, of the overdrawn sinister housekeeper) are more or less believable, countless imitators in his wake threw credulity to the winds. Plots grew more and more preposterous and the characters more ludicrous, with colourless heroines and heroes warding off an endless stream of manic monks and scalpel-happy surgeons.
Needless to say, these were totally devoid of deliberate humour, although if they were staged today they would no doubt induce immense hilarity. So witless, in every sense of the word, were they that it would only be possible now to play them as pastiche in the style of The Rockey Horror Show, which successfully parodies the man-made-monster school of spine-tingling ‘crawler’.
Having said that, the well-crafted comedy thriller which set out to inspire both laughter and shocks in equal parts was still there if you looked. Arnold Ridley, who forty years later would find fame once again as the bumbling Private Godfrey in BBC TV’s Dad’s Army, first came to prominence in the twenties as a playwright, and his 1925 hit The Ghost Train is still remembered today as one of the first and best home-grown spooky comedies. The film version which has come down to us, starring ‘Big-Hearted’ Arthur Askey and his long-time oppo Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch, still stands as a valuable portrait of times gone by, not only in terms of dress, demeanour and social attitudes bit also as an indication of the kind of thing people liked to laugh at in those days. If the humour seems gentler and less aggressive than what we are used to now, it could simply mean that we have lost a sense of innocence which could well be worth reviving.
Not that innocence was the be-all and end-all even then. Many people might nominate Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 play Arsenic and Old Lace, the story of two little old ladies and their hobby of poisoning unwelcome visitors, as a classic comedy thriller, not least because it has been quite simply one of the most successful plays of the last fifty years. The original production ran for 1,437 performances on Broadway and in Britain it held the record for the longest-running play at the Strand Theatre in the West End until it was overtaken by No Sex Please, We’re British in 1974. However, although it abounds in corpses and homicidal maniacs, it is essentially a slapstick comedy rather than a thriller, for it lacks the vital element of ingenuity in plotting which turns a linear storyline into a complex web of intrigue with jump-scares.
On the whole, the cinema has been a more fruitful source of both straightforward comedy thrillers and the pastiche. During the thirties and forties some of the most popular were the series of films based on Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man. Basically these were conventional detective stories, but gifted the extra dimension of comedy by the sparkle and sophistication of both the dialogue and the playing of William Powell and Myrna Loy as Hammett’s sleuthing duo Nick and Nora Charles. It was rather as if Neil Simon, the chronicler of New York manners and modes, had turned his hand to the whodunnit – which in fact he did in 1976 when he wrote the screenplay for Murder by Death, one character in which was actually a parody of Nick Charles going under the name of Dick Charlesworth.
This star-studded extravaganza (the cast included Alec Guinness, Peter Falk, Peter Sellers, David Niven and Maggie Smith) concerns five eminent detectives who are invited by an eccentric electronics wizard (played, eccentrically, by the novelist Truman Capote) to his mansion in order to solve a murder which has not yet taken place. Apart from Dick Charlesworth, the celebrated quintet consists of the San Francisco gumshoe Sam Diamond, the Belgian detective Milo Perrier, Inspector Sidney Wang and the hearty Englishwoman Jessica (Elsa Lanchester) Marbles. Even the house is a parody of those gloomy Victorian mansions of early thrillers, containing as it does such traditional built-in features as a portrait with moving eyes, a descending ceiling and acres of panelled walls.
The connection between Nick Charles of the Thin Man films and Dick Charlesworth of Murder by Death continues, curiously, with that between Sam Diamond in Neil Simon’s film and another pastioche thriller which appeared the same year. Sam Diamond was, of course, based on Sam Spade, the cynical private incvestigator of (again) Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon and the memorable film version of 1941 in which John Huston debuted as a director. The story – a cool study of human greed – concerns the search by various villains for the statue of a falcon said to be encrusted with fabulous jewels. Thirty-four years later the search is resumed in the inspired if uneven parody of Huston’s film, The Black Bird, in which George Segal plays Sam Spade Junior, reluctant heir to his father’s detective agency and the secretary Effie, played by Lee Patrick who took the same part in the original film. This time the legendary bird is found, only to be thrown, during the free-for-all finale, into San Francisco Bay where it is swallowed by a shark (Jaws had happened the same year).
The 1940s were the heyday of those dark, menacing thrillers which acquired the label film noir to describe their exploration of the darker side of humanity. These were parodied in the 1981 comedy thriller Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, in which private eye Rigby Reardon, played by Steve Martin, is hired by a beautiful heiress to investigate the death of her father.
It went even further than other parodies by including actual clips from old ’forties films. Scenes from such classics as Double Indemnity, Ther Big Sleep, This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key and many more were incorporated into the main narrative and featured Veronica Lake, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, James Cagney, Alan Ladd and Joan Crawford – to name but a few.
Meanwhile, what was happening in the theatre? Thrillers at last grew up in the expert hands of such specialists as Patrick Hamilton, Agatha Christie, Francis Durbridge and Frederick Knott, though their particular techniques for turning the screw didn’t allow for much humour. Comedy thrillers per se remained a rarity, though in recent years the thriller has become more sophisticated and is often laced with wit. Two of the biggest hits over the last couple of decades have been Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth and Ira Levin’s Deathtrap, both of which have an elegance, a lightness of touch and a degree of verbal dexterity which raise them above the level of the average thriller, and whose carefully timed jokes spice the more conventional moments of sweaty-palmed action.
In purer comic vein, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) is a full-blooded and hugely enjoyable parody of the drawing room murder mystery as seen through the eyes of a couple of theatre critics who end up getting drawn into the very action they are reviewing. Here, ingenuity of stagecraft is at least as sophisticated as the convolutions of the plot, a feature that has since become a Stoppard trademark. His 1988 stage thriller Hapgood manages to combine not only the customary verbal fireworks with a fiendishly bewildering story about single double (or is it triple.) spies, but also a beginner’s guide to the mysteries of quantum mechanics. And why not?
Alan Ayckbourn is the supreme exponent today of comedy tinged with tragedy, and if those two elements can be successfully combined, there is no good reason why we shouldn’t laugh as we bite our fingernails in suspense. Ayckbourn himself has already ventured into comedy thriller territory with Communicating Doors (1994), in which a murder mystery plot becomes even more convoluted due to the presence of a revolving door that enables some of the characters to travel through time – with the added incentive for one of them that id she doesn’t, she might not be able to prevent her own death…
The comedy thriller has proved itself to be a popular and enduring hybrid, and as we approach the millennium, the mind can only boggle at the changes still waiting to be rung on this most exuberant and entertaining genre. Carry on quaking!