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Glass Onion’s psychotic 1970s sibling: the strange saga of The Last of Sheila

James Mason, Raquel Welch, James Coburn, Joan Hackett, Herbert Ross, Dyan Cannon and Richard Benjamin on the set of The Last Of Sheila - Alamy
James Mason, Raquel Welch, James Coburn, Joan Hackett, Herbert Ross, Dyan Cannon and Richard Benjamin on the set of The Last Of Sheila - Alamy

Early on in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel Glass Onion, Daniel Craig’s super-sleuth Benoit Blanc is shown having a Zoom conversation in the bath with a quartet of his famous friends: Angela Lansbury, Natasha Lyonne, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Stephen Sondheim. Of the four, Sondheim’s presence is the most attention-grabbing and inexplicable – especially given his death in November 2021, making this his last appearance on film.

Lansbury, of course, was in Murder She Wrote, Lyonne is about to appear in the Johnson-created detective series Poker Face and Abdul-Jabbar has combined his distinguished NBA career with performances in such crime films as Fletch and Game of Death. But what is Sondheim, the great doyen of American musical theatre, doing accompanying Blanc in the bath?

The reason is simple. Johnson has been gleefully candid that a major inspiration for both Knives Out and Glass Onion has been the 1973 murder mystery The Last of Sheila, directed by Herbert Ross and, most intriguingly, co-written by Sondheim and Psycho star Anthony Perkins. Yet if the debt that Knives Out owed to the film was implicit, Johnson has been happy to acknowledge that the similarities between Glass Onion and The Last of Sheila are explicit.

Both films revolve around a disparate cast of largely unlikeable characters gathered together in the Mediterranean by a hugely wealthy man in order to solve a murder, and in both cases it becomes clear that the people are linked to one another in unpredictable and surprising ways.

While Glass Onion’s production took place last year, Johnson described The Last of Sheila as “[a] fantastic 70s whodunnit written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins and pretty much the reason I’m in Greece right now”, and subsequently elaborated, saying to Entertainment Weekly that “The thing I’m most excited about is my friends who are big fans of The Last of Sheila who see the trailer and think they’re going to show up and be able to solve the movie because they know The Last of Sheila. I’m very proud that the movie very immediately goes its own direction. It’s really the set-up of the murder mystery game, hosted by the rich jerk who everybody has a motive to kill, that’s just the starting point for it.”

Nonetheless, he praised the earlier film for having one of the “all-time great 70s casts”, and described Kate Hudson’s idiotic fashionista Birdie Jay as being directly inspired by Dyan Cannon’s performance as a talent agent in The Last of Sheila.

Yet Sondheim and Perkins’s collaboration – the only original film screenplay that either man ever wrote – remains a fascinatingly unusual one. The two men met when Perkins was appearing in the one-off television musical Evening Primrose, which had music and lyrics by Sondheim and a book by James Goldman, who later collaborated with the composer on Follies.

Perkins and Sondheim hit it off, and even lived together for a period; the actor was trying to subvert the typecasting that he had been forced into ever since his appearance as the serial killer Norman Bates in Psycho, and the composer wrote several leads in musicals that were inspired by the man who became both his friend and muse.

Daniel Craig in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Netflix
Daniel Craig in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Netflix

While Perkins and Sondheim didn’t get to collaborate on stage again, their friendship endured thanks to a shared love for elaborate murder mysteries, especially the novels of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. Over the course of the late Sixties and early Seventies, they created elaborate scavenger hunts that took place in Manhattan and were designed for showbusiness friends of theirs – including the actors George Segal and Lee Remick, and The Last of Sheila director Ross – to follow a series of cryptic clues over the city, such as numbers being found on separate pieces of a birthday cake. Once the mystery was solved, there would be a lavish party.

Perkins and Sondheim, however, soon became dissatisfied with these relatively small-scale festivities, and wanted to take their interests in a wider direction. As Sondheim later said, “The idea for the movie grew out of two murder games I devised some time ago. One was for [the actress and singer] Phyllis Newman; the other for four couples just after I got out of college. With the four couples, I told each person to think of a way to kill one of the others over the weekend we would be spending together in the country. Then we passed out envelopes and inside one was an ‘X’. That person was the only one who was to carry out his plan; the others were to spend the time avoiding being murdered.”

Perkins and Sondheim came up initially with the storyline for The Last of Sheila, which involved a film producer gathering six guests on board his yacht in order to solve the hit-and-run murder of his wife the previous year, and then, almost to both men’s surprise, a finished screenplay.

Screenwriters Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim on set in 1993 - Alamy
Screenwriters Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim on set in 1993 - Alamy

Sondheim later said: “I knew [Perkins] had exactly my mind and take and he’s much more into murder mysteries than I am, so we started to plot it. We spent a couple of months plotting it, and had such a good time we decided to go ahead and write it. I think the most fun I’ve ever had writing anything was writing [the film’s] screenplay.” The central characters were all related to the film industry in one way or another, sparking much excited speculation as to which ones were thinly disguised versions of real-life figures, portrayed unflatteringly.

Cannon’s performance as talent agent Christine was based on then-legendary agent Sue Mengers, who represented everyone from Perkins to Barbra Streisand; Mengers was initially offered the chance to play a heightened version of herself, but turned it down on the grounds that it would be tactless to take on the work when many of her clients needed it.

The actress initially rejected the part, saying “the script seemed too broad, everybody caricaturised, especially my part. I mean, Sue Mengers is wild, but not that wild. There seemed to be no humanity in the women’s roles”, but Mengers herself talked her into it. Eventually, Cannon commented “I still had to bring a lot to it, and I think the result’s unlike anything I’ve ever done.”

Raquel Welch with director Herbert Ross - Alamy
Raquel Welch with director Herbert Ross - Alamy

The other actors were more circumspect. James Mason, who was hired to play the over-the-hill paedophile film director Philip Dexter (supposedly a caricature of Orson Welles), noted: “Steve and Tony insist they wrote the part for me. If they did, they did it for a ready-made image. If the passé director is played by someone who makes constant appearances on The Late, Late Show, it helps. Consequently I’m playing it as everybody’s idea of James Mason.”

Yet the veteran English actor clashed from the beginning with his co-star Raquel Welch, who was playing the similarly out-of-favour actress Alice Wood; he later described her as “the most selfish, ill-mannered, inconsiderate actress that I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with.”

Welch had appeared in a series of recent flops, such as the failed Gore Vidal adaptation Myra Breckinridge, in an attempt to shake off the dumb starlet image that she had acquired from her appearances in the likes of One Million Years B.C and Fathom. She believed that she was playing a caricature of the actress Ann-Margret; her talent-manger husband was played by Ian McShane.

Richard Benjamin in The Last Of Sheila - Alamy
Richard Benjamin in The Last Of Sheila - Alamy

As well as Mason’s disdain, McShane said of Welch that “She isn’t the most friendly creature. She seems to set out with the impression that no one is going to like her.”

And it wasn't only Welch's co-star who commented on her behaviour.  When the actress was introduced to the photographer Eva Sereny, who had been hired to take on-set photographs, Sereny recounted that Welch reportedly snarled “Who the hell are you?”, and then shouted “I don’t want her here! I don’t want her here!” before disappearing in a sulk. As Sereny later said, with commendable understatement, “That was my first encounter with Raquel.”

In many respects, the production proved to be anything but the jeu d’esprit that Perkins and Sondheim might have wished for. The film was set on a yacht, and on the first day of shooting, Ross approached his stars Cannon and Richard Benjamin and informed them that “We’ve got a little problem.”

Raquel Welch in The Last of Sheila - Alamy
Raquel Welch in The Last of Sheila - Alamy

The boat that they had intended to use for the production had first burnt down, and then sunk, resulting in the swift hire of producer Sol Siegel’s yacht as a replacement. This proved impractical as a place to shoot the film, so a set had to be built at the Victorine studios in Nice: coincidentally next door to where Francois Truffaut was shooting Day For Night, another meta-cinematic story, complete with a cameo by the novelist Graham Greene.

A greater difficulty then presented itself. The film’s production began in the wake of Black September, and threats of violence were issued against the filmmakers and cast because it was believed that there were too many Jews involved in the production. As Benjamin commented to the LA Times, “We didn’t realise it at first. Cars were following us when we left the set. That was security people they hired. However, the Israelis on the crew, they quit. They said, ‘You’re kind of not taking this as seriously as you should. We’re out of here.’ The Israelis knew what these people could do. The French police said, ‘We can’t quite guarantee your safety.’"

The cast dealt with the difficulties in varied fashion: Cannon engaged in primal therapy (“I just screamed my way through it”), while Welch claimed that Ross had assaulted her in her dressing room during production, and fled to London, refusing to return unless she was accompanied by a bodyguard. Her claims were met with incredulity; the film’s studio Warner Brothers issued an unprecedented statement criticising her “public utterances” and supporting Ross, while Perkins, responding to the rumours that her actions were designed to allow her to promote her forthcoming film Kansas City Bomber, observed: “She really should have done it closer to when the picture actually opens.”

Richard Benjamin and James Mason in The Last of Sheila - Alamy
Richard Benjamin and James Mason in The Last of Sheila - Alamy

There was an apocryphal story that, in order to avenge themselves on the diva, members of the production crew opened a sewage valve on the boat for a scene in which Welch has to swim next to it. Whatever the truth, it was testament to the actress’s unpopularity with some on the production that the story could even be considered to be accurate.

The film received excellent reviews upon release, with Roger Ebert saying The Last of Sheila as “the kind of movie that wraps you up in itself, and absorbs you at the very time you're being impressed by its cleverness”. Although it only just recouped its $2 million production budget at the box office, it has long since been a cult film, beloved by admirers of Perkins, Sondheim and twisted murder mysteries alike.

Although there has been occasional speculation that it will be remade, at one point with uber-producer Joel Silver on board, this has never come to pass. Hopefully Glass Onion’s sly, affectionate homage will continue the appreciation that its predecessor so richly deserves. At one point in the earlier film, a character muses “Do you ever think that we’ll hear the last of Sheila?” On this evidence, hopefully not.