See How They Run

Year 15, Day 27 - 1/27/23 - Movie #4,328

BEFORE: I'm leaving for Massachusetts this morning, going to check in on my parents because we didn't see them at Christmas. So once I watch my movie late Thursday/early morning Friday I'm going to sleep, and I hope to get a chance to post from my parents' house late Friday night, after the drive.

Adrien Brody carries over from "Blonde". This is another who-dun-it mystery, like "Glass Onion", and another connection is that both titles seem to reference Beatles songs, "See How they Run" is a line from "Lady Madonna", and also "I Am the Walrus".

THE PLOT: In the West End of 1950's London, plans for a movie version of a smash-hit play come to an abrupt halt after a pivotal member of the crew is murdered.

AFTER: Well, we made it to Massachusetts, I had to plug my Dad's old computer in to post tonight - so I'm on a Lenovo PC with an old version of Firefox instead of my usual Mac with Chrome, so things are all weird and up-ended. I may not be able to make a full post with photos and "last seen in" credits, but this is a short trip so I'm just going to make a basic post and I'll clean things up when I'm back home in NYC on Sunday. I have to post and watch movies, I can't fall behind or else I won't be able to start the February chain on time. 

I was a bit off-base, the title "See How They Run" has nothing to do with any Beatles song, it's from the nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice", because the action here is all centered around a play written by Agatha Christie, called "The Mousetrap", which is the longest running play EVER, anywhere.  It's a murder mystery play that began running in London's West End in 1952, and ran continuously for decades, until March 2020 when every theater was forced to closed by the COVID-19 pandemic.  But then it re-opened in May 2021, and has logged almost 29,000 performances to date. 

Knowing a lot about "The Mousetrap" is very helpful here, because it's the "play-within-a-movie" and some of the action in the movie outside the play mirrors what takes place inside the play. The play has an inspector/detective gather all the suspects together in one room to reveal the identity of the murderer, and naturally the movie also has an inspector/detective gather all the suspects in one room, it's just that the room is the theater in which "The Mousetrap" is performed.  The murder victim is the man who was going to direct the film version of the play, but who wanted him dead?  Who would benefit from the play being forced to close (which it never did) or the movie version not being made?

There's a bit of fun here, lots of inside jokes, because the actors and play producers are all larger-than-life characters, some based on real people (Richard "Dickie" Attenborough, or an actor playing a version of him, plays Inspector Trotter on the stage, as the real Attenborough did in real life).  The detective is named Stoppard, and the playwright Tom Stoppard wrote a play in 1968 titled "The Real Inspector Hound" which parodied many elements of "The Mousetrap" - this whole film could also be seen as a parody of the same. \

The play has a twist ending, and the cast encourages the audience not to tell other people about the ending, and that probably helped the play run so long. "See How They Run" also has a twist ending, one that's very similar, and also encourages the movie audience to help keep the ending a secret, but these days all you have to do is look any movie up on Wikipedia and it will tell you everything. 

Inspector Stoppard is forced to work with an eager young female officer, Constable Stalker, when he would prefer to solve this film director's murder at his own pace, which means visiting several pubs and taking a lot of naps.  Stalker tries to put the pieces together herself, and her leaps in logic seem to suggest that Stoppard himself might be the murderer, because his ex-wife might have been having an affair with the film director. To be fair, it's also true that she saw him kneeling over the body of the second victim, the screenwriter hired to turn "The Mousetrap" into a movie. 

Supposedly the big trick pulled by Agatha Christie is that the play could not become a movie until six months after its West End run ended, and as we modern movie-viewers know, the play's run continued on for 68 years, so that movie was never going to be made, anyway.  This is loosely based on real events, but in real life Christie wouldn't allow "The Mousetrap" to be printed as a short story until after the play's run, because she feared that if everyone read the story, then there would be no more reason to go see the live performance. 

The cast of the play and the movie producer receive invitations for dinner at Agatha Christie's house, which is only weird because she was a bit of a recluse and tended not to invite people over, I think.  She sure didn't invite THIS bunch to dinner, but someone did, it's almost as if somebody was trying to gather them all together in one room, Hmmmm....

But by this time, both Inspector Stoppard and Constable Stalker have figured out who the murderer is, so there's a mad race to Agatha Christie's house where the killer is about to reveal himself.  They can't possibly get there in time, but perhaps Christie herself could help figure things out?  She was the master of creating solvable crimes, after all.

The movie also features an extended set of flashbacks, immediately after the screenwriter character declares that "Flashbacks are the worst!"  I feel you, Mervyn, and I agree - but clearly this movie's not taking itself too seriously, which is fine.  There are also several references to "Hamlet", which also had a "play-within-the-play" that mirrored the murderous events taking place around it. As I've said several times this month, if a movie feels like it's made by people having fun, that tends to go a long way.

Also starring Sam Rockwell (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Ammonite"), Ruth Wilson (last seen in "How to Talk To Girls at Parties"), Reece Shearsmith (last seen in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage"), Harris Dickinson (last seen in "The King's Man"), Charlie Cooper (last seen in "Greed"), David Oyelowo (last seen in "Don't Let Go"), Shirley Henderson (last seen in "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"), Lucian Msamati (last seen in "The Good Liar"), Pippa Bennett-Warner (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Pearl Chanda, Paul Chahidi (last seen in "The Voices"), Sian Clifford, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Tim Key (also last seen in "Greed"), Angus Wright (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Kieran Hodgson, Gregory Cox (last seen in "X-Men: First Class"), Maggie McCarthy (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Oliver Jackson, Tomi Ogbaro, Ania Marson, Philip Desmeules, Laura Morgan (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Tolu Ogunmefun

RATING: 6 out of 10 jigsaw puzzle pieces