Foul Play (Shelburne Associates, Miller-Milkis Pictures, Paramount, 1978)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 10) my husband Charles and I watched three films in a row on Turner Classic Movies (TCM): the 1978 comedy Foul Play and two 1919 vehicles for Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa (the only person of Asian descent to become a major star in Hollywood films until … well, it’s hard to say who was the next one: Nancy Kwan in the 1950’s? Bruce Lee in the 1960’s?), The Dragon Painter and The Tong Man. Foul Play was written and directed by Colin Higgins (1941-1988), a comic genius whose all too brief career was truncated by AIDS, which killed him at age 47. Higgins was born in France to an Australian mother and an American father, and he had an odd life. His dad enlisted in the U.S. Army following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and his mom moved the family to Sydney, Australia, where Higgins grew up. In 1957 Higgins and his family moved to Redwood City, California, where he won a college scholarship to Stanford University but dropped out after one year because he’d become “obsessed” with theatre. He briefly enlisted in the U.S. Army (fortunately before Lyndon Johnson’s drastic escalation of the war in Viet Nam!) and, like Stanley Kubrick before him, worked for Stars and Stripes, the servicemembers’ magazine. Discharged from the Army in 1965, he returned to Stanford and majored in creative writing. Then he visited Expo ’67 in Montréal, Canada and became fascinated by the experimental films shown there. Higgins enrolled in a masters’ program in screenwriting at UCLA, and his masters’ thesis was the screenplay for what became his first film as writer, Harold and Maude (1972), a dark comedy about a young death-obsessed 20-year-old man (Bud Cort) and an 80-year-old woman concentration camp survivor (Ruth Gordon) whom he falls in love with and who gives him a reason to live. Harold and Maude was one of those movies that was a commercial flop on its initial release but eventually acquired a cult audience, and Higgins made more money from a French adaptation of it into a play in the 1970’s.

In 1977 Robert Evans, production chief at Paramount, gave Higgins a chance to make his debut as a director with Foul Play, originally called Killing Lydia, a spoof of spy melodramas in general and Alfred Hitchcock in particular starring Goldie Hawn as recently divorced librarian Gloria Mundy and Chevy Chase, star of the first season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live TV show, in his first feature film as San Francisco Police Detective Tony Carlson. Foul Play was a major commercial hit and gave Higgins the chance to make his next film, Nine to Five – his masterpiece – in 1980, only his career came to a screeching halt with the failure of his third film as director, the leaden musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982). From then on his only credits were for writing the TV miniseries Out on a Limb, based on actress Shirley MacLaine’s experiences with supernaturalism and spiritualism, and two episodes of a Yugoslav TV series called TV teatar, featuring live transmissions of plays. Foul Play deals with Gloria Mundy and her search for love and commitment following the trauma of her divorce. It begins at a fancy party to which she’s reluctantly been taken by her best friend, Stella (Marilyn Sokol), who warns Our Heroine to be fiercely protective of her virtue and gives her items – a pair of brass knuckles (obviously too big for her), chemical Mace and a portable device that sounds like a burglar alarm – to help her fend off men interested only in “that one thing.” Stella is actually urging Gloria to go out and meet more potential dates despite her warnings about predatory men, and Detective Carlson is also at the party and decides to swoop in on her.

Before that scene we’ve been given a prologue involving the Archbishop of San Francisco, who’s stabbed to death by an intruder in his home right after he’s put on a record of the opening of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Mikado. (There’s a glitch here: though the album cover is of The Mikado, the record label is a grey Columbia Masterworks one listing a Mozart symphony.) Then Gloria goes out for a drive on a winding mountain road in her yellow Volkswagen convertible – depicted by a quite elaborate aerial shot that especially impressed Charles: he pointed out that today a shot like that would be done with a camera-containing drone or even with CGI, but in 1978 the only way would have been to hire a helicopter and follow either Goldie Hawn or her stunt double as they drove). Only she’s flagged down by Bob “Scottie” Scott (Bruce Solomon), whose car has broken down and who asks her for a ride back to San Francisco and sneaks a roll of 127 film (an old camera format in which the film wound itself around a take-up reel; you didn’t have to rewind the film in the camera the way you did with 35 mm because you’d simply seal off the end and use the now-exhausted spool the film had come on to take up your next roll) into a pack of Marlboro cigarettes he gives her. He makes a date with her to meet her at the Nuart Cinema for a revival film showing, but he doesn’t show – and when he does arrive midway through the movie, he’s been mortally wounded. (The marquee on the Nuart announces two films that don’t really exist – Killers Walk Among Us and This Gun Is Mine – but there are also promos for midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and plenty of authentic posters for films that do exist.)

With his dying breath Scottie tells her to beware of the dwarf. When Gloria discovers Scottie’s body she screams – only that happens at a particularly frightening part of the film, so everyone else in the audience screams too. She knocks on the door of the theatre manager’s office – interrupting him in the middle of having sex with an usherette – and begs him to put the house lights up, stop the film and call the cops. The cops duly arrive in the persons of Detective Carlson and his partner, Ferguson (Brian Dennehy, marvelous as usual), but by the time they get there the body is gone and there’s no sign he was ever there, alive or dead. The next day, trying to close up the library after hours, Gloria runs into albino hit man Whitey Jackson (William Frankfather) who tries to incapacitate her with ether. She flees into a straight singles bar called “Twosome” and Stanley Tibbetts (Dudley Moore, who got featured billing) tries to pick her up. Gloria basically throws herself at him just to get his help getting out of the bar, to which Whitey and the gang he’s part of have traced her. She ends up in Tibbetts’s home, which is outfitted as a sure-fire seduction pad à la Jack Lemmon’s living spaces in Under the Yum Yum Tree and How to Murder Your Wife, only to flee again once she sees out the window that Jackson is no longer there stalking the place. When she gets back to her own place she’s assaulted again, this time by Scarface (Don Calfa), who demands the pack of cigarettes Scottie gave her. She’s inadvertently saved by Whitey Jackson, who throws a knife and kills Scarface, but she’s knocked out and when she comes to, once again the body has been taken and there’s no sign that anything untoward ever happened there.

The next day Gloria is attacked again, this time by Turk Farnum (Ion Teodorescu), a bald man (though he sometimes wears wigs) who looks like a mid-1960’s James Bond villain. This time Carlson and Ferguson are assigned to protect Gloria, and Carlson does that by taking her to his houseboat (a living space built by his brother, who abandoned it when he got married) and spending the night in bed with her. Ultimately it turns out that the bad guys are members of an organization called “Tax the Churches” (which really existed, though as far as I know it never resorted to terrorism), and they’re planning to assassinate the (fictitious) Pope Pius XIII when he comes to San Francisco as part of a five-city U.S. tour and attends the gala San Francisco Opera performance of, you guessed it, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The architect of the plot is Delia Darrow (Rachel Roberts), who assumed the name of “Gerda Casswell” and got a job as the Archbishop’s housekeeper – only she killed him and got his twin brother (also Eugene Roche) to impersonate him. Also part of the plot were Whitey Jackson, Scarface, and Rupert Stiltskin (Marc Lawrence), Delia’s second-in-command. Before that there’s a great scene in which Gloria’s home is invaded by a real dwarf, J. J. MacKuen (Billy Barty, who’d had bit parts in classic musicals like Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and Roman Scandals), who’s a particularly pushy Bible salesman but whom Gloria is freaked out by from the moment he knocks on her door and fools her into thinking he’s full-sized by standing on his sample case. Naturally Gloria assumes he’s an assassin sent to kill her – she was warned, “Beware of the dwarf,” after all – and she pitches him out her window and he falls down a manhole and ends up in traction at a hospital. The climax occurs at the big opera gala, where the Pope is supposed to get killed, only the good guys are able to foil it in time and arrest all the would-be terrorists while Pope Pius XIII is able to sit through the opera and enjoy it without any awareness that he was ever in danger.

While not at the level of Nine to Five, Foul Play is an especially delicious movie that evokes many of Hitchcock’s films (including both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Notorious and a real surprise, Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot, which came out two years before Foul Play and also featured a high-ranking clergyman being the victim of a crime and an exciting chase scene down a mountain road) while not being so obvious about it Higgins waves his knowledge of classic cinema in our faces. It also contains at least one anticipation of a famous film that would come later: The Da Vinci Code, which would also feature an albino assassin hired in a plot to bring down the Roman Catholic Church. Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase make an appealing pair of leads; Burgess Meredith, billed third as Gloria’s landlord, is a real charmer, especially when he claims to be an expert on judo, which he was trained in during World War II. There’s a great scene in which he tries to bust a brick with his bare hand, misses, then tries it again and this time he makes it. He also insists on coming along when Carlson gets word that Ferguson is being held for ransom, and the “ransom” in this case is the promise that the cops will back off and let the assassination happen on cue. Only the three are able to escape when there’s a shift change at the massage parlor where Gloria has gone to hide out disguised as a masseuse – and where Stanley Tibbetts has gone expecting sex and getting his personal blue-balls city instead. There’s also one of the great shock cuts of all time when the opera performance is about to open, the conductor strides to the podium – and it’s Stanley. Foul Play is a broadly funny comedy and a weird testament to the gifts of Colin Higgins, a remarkable filmmaker who if he’d lived a while longer could have become the Preston Sturges of our time.