One cause among many for the outpouring of grief at the recent loss of Tim Curry is how adeptly the 80-year-old actor crossed generational lines. Though he didn’t appear in quite as many films as you might remember — his dozens of theatrical performances, many TV guest shots, and hundred-plus voiceover roles kept him plenty busy, and made him seem ubiquitous even as his big-screen appearances were relatively limited — those movies were meted out perfectly to capture the affection of decades’ worth of fans. Boomers and Gen-Xers might best identify him with his 1975 movie debut in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (reprising his repeated theatrical role of Dr. Frank N. Furter); younger millennials and older Gen-Z kids, meanwhile, probably recall his villainous turn as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island (or, depending on their parents’ permissiveness and/or tolerance for extremely silly pulp adventure movies, supporting turns in mid-’90s movies like The Three Musketeers, The Shadow, and Congo).
Smack in the middle of that two-decade range arrived a box office flop that nonetheless feels like the defining Tim Curry movie for anyone born in the Xennial range of 1975 through its 1985 release: Clue, a murder mystery comedy based on, yes, the popular board game of the same name.
In terms of perceived star power, 1985 was not a great year for Curry, at least not at the time. He appeared in devilishly elaborate makeup for Legend, an expensive fantasy flop directed by Ridley Scott and starring a young Tom Cruise — still one of Cruise’s most expensive misfires! — followed by Clue, a farce where he led a robust cast of comic ringers (Madeline Khan, Michael McKean, and Martin Mull) and comedy-leaning character actors (Christopher Lloyd and Eileen Brennan). When it was first released, the movie was probably best-known for a gimmick more or less eliminated by home video: Different theaters would have different endings in the final stretch, providing three different solutions to the movie’s whodunit. The seemingly arbitrary nature of having a mystery that can lead to three distinct outcomes was not lost on critics at the time, who dismissed the movie as thin and gimmicky.
On video and TV, however, the endings are played one after another, which only increases the movie’s frenetic energy, with Curry leading the charge. As in the game, a group of well-to-do types with color-coded aliases — Mrs. Peacock (Brennan), Mrs. White (Kahn), Professor Plum (Lloyd), Colonel Mustard (Mull), Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren), Mr. Green (McKean) — are suspects in the eventual murder of a man called Mr. Boddy and, as the evening goes on, several more individuals. To these familiar suspect names, the movie adds Wadsworth (Curry), the house butler, as a sort of emcee for the evening’s proceedings. It’s a murder mystery party with real corpses at the center.
Curry takes fullest advantage of the movie’s narrative convolutions, making the gimmick-driven flexibility seem playful rather than opportunistic. If Wadsworth seems to be talking out of both sides of his mouth and playing multiple sides by necessity of the screenplay, Curry takes to his multitude of potentially incoherent tasks like a zesty ringmaster. The film and Curry’s performance both come to an extended climax around the 68-minute mark, when Wadsworth announces he knows who has committed the murders and launches into a frenzied explanation that involves walking — actually, sprinting! — the other characters (and the audience) though a re-enactment of the evening’s proceedings, seen and unseen.
To this end, Curry dashes, tumbles, performs impromptu impressions of his castmates, all in the midst of an extended farcical-meets-expositional monologue. It’s a feat that demanded so much of him physically that he was briefly hospitalized after filming it. This bravura performance branches off into three endings, and watching them in succession (rather than the original intention of one at a time) only drives home how much Curry is doing to hold them all together, no matter what direction the action is moving. His work makes the final 20 minutes or so of the full Clue play a bit like a long-form improv exercise, where all of the movie’s murder mystery set-up and many of its verbal jokes are called back (and create running gags of their own, chief among them the recurring observation that “communism was just a red herring”), complete with the energy of a live performance that can’t be exactly replicated each night.
Some of the movie’s balancing act between mystery and farce can be attributed to writer-director Jonathan Lynn, an English filmmaker who repeatedly demonstrated a keen sense of how to integrate broad comedy into a quasi-serious framework; he performs a similar trick in My Cousin Vinny, where a murder trial needs a fair measure of set-up before Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei can make their fish-out-of-water shtick really sing. Clue being an actual murder mystery (however fungible the different solutions) carries it through the moments when the rat-a-tat dialogue fails to match its finest screwball predecessors. That it’s trying to keep that pace at all — Lynn supposedly had the cast watch His Girl Friday as preparation — probably accounts for some of its home-video and cable-rerun popularity amongst ’80s kids, who might have been getting their first exposure to comedy running at this speed.
But the fondness so many (including myself) hold for this movie all comes back to Curry. The other players are very funny, particularly McKean and Brennan, but Curry has the stealth starring role as the butler who eventually seems in complete control of the outcome. His magnetism throughout feels like a magic trick. If the movie had been a hit, this might have been considered a star-making performance.
Instead, Clue failed to make back its budget at the box office; the years immediately following, Curry focused more on stage work. His next movie, the little-seen Pass the Ammo, followed in 1987, and that was, amazingly, his last major film role of the 1980s before he had a bit of a comeback in the 1990s, which proved to be his busiest decade for live-action film work. By the time of Muppet Treasure Island, a new generation of kids could see the relish he seemed to bring to every role.
With so many roles under his belt, Curry didn’t need Clue to burnish his legacy. But he clearly gave it his all, and in his hands a potentially misguided curiosity has become a cult classic.
Where to Stream Tim Curry in Clue:
Stream Clue on YouTube
Stream Clue on Paramount+
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
Stream Clue on Paramount+
