Clue (1985) film notes by Tova Gannana for CSA Hitchcock

In Clue (1985) the servants, not the guests, get killed by a rope, a wrench, a lead pipe, gunfire, and a knife. More than just their uniforms, the servants are accomplices to blackmail. They are the ones who have been digging up the dirt and dishing it out to Wadsworth (Tim Curry). The house where they serve is just what an American would imagine the house of a British aristocrat to be: the first floor done up in paneling and chandeliers, a grand staircase and rooms named as places: the library, the study, the lounge. Like the American imagination, not is all as it seems. The bookshelves are not shelves of books, but doors. Wadsworth holds the keys. In each room a wall, a portrait, or a closet is a front for a passageway that leads the seeker from one room to another throughout the house. The second floor is dilapidated, the cellar full of cobwebs. Money is spent where it can be seen. 

The servants are who one would expect a mansion to have; a cook, a butler and a maid. All end up dead when the electric switch is flipped. Though not all at once. 

The guests have been invited by way of a letter. The guests are all in one boat, one camp, on one side. Though they don’t know it while dinner is being served. They have been told by Wadsworth, whom they assume to be the butler, that they must keep their real identities to themselves. They take Wadsworth at his word because of how he is dressed, because he opens the front door they all walk through feigning confusion as to why they have been invited to this house on the hill. Everyone has an alias. That is the first clue. What they are hiding is obvious. Secrets. Ones that can get them into lots of trouble. Mrs. Scarlett (Lesley Ann Warren) doesn’t care. She’s a madam and some of her clientele are in the same room. 

Lightning strikes outside, the dinner gong sounds, the doorbell rings, someone calls on the telephone; that someone is J. Edgar Hoover. These guests and these blackmailers all have one address; the capitol. “Mind if I smoke?” Mrs. Scarlett asks, not waiting to be answered. “I need a drink,” each guest says at some point as they follow one another from room to room. It’s exhausting to pretend not to know, and also great fun. They carry the servants' bodies to the study as though the cadavers were furniture or kindling. They drop the cook to the floor and step over her in her white orthopedic shoes. It’s all a game. 

The guests are well-heeled. They work in Washington D.C. They have misstepped, and their wrong turns have been taken advantage of and used against them. Wadsworth tells them their deeds are un-American. Set in 1954, Clue doesn’t feel dated. According to Wadsworth, blackmailing is very American. 

Clue "plays" the way an animated and enthusiastic board game is played. It is physical, unexpected, back and forth banter. Clue is not to be taken seriously though the time period it depicts was serious. Colonel Mustard is developing a fusion bomb, Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Breenan) bribes lobbyists for her husband who is a senator, Mrs. Scarlett’s escort ring was popular with Mrs. White’s (Madeline Kahn) murdered husband, Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd) works for the W.H.O and the U.N. hired by them after he lost his psychiatric license for sleeping with his clients. Mr. Green is the only one without a record. He too confesses alongside Mrs. Scarlett to knowing why he is being blackmailed, but his confession is smoke, an attempt to get on the same level. His role is that of jester. Mr. Green thinks of himself like the color green, fresh and incorruptible, like nature. His thinks hands are clean. Green has the last line of the film, as the FBI, for whom he works, busts in and makes their arrests, “I’m going home to sleep with my wife.” The frame on his face freezes.