Say you take a murder mystery board game and turn it into a full-length movie. You turn the tiny technicolor chess-piece-shaped plastic pieces into murder suspects: Mr. Green, Colonel Mustard, Mrs. White, and, well, you get the idea. You make sure that they’re all played by some of the campiest comedians out there — Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, and Christopher Lloyd, to name a few. And then you set the scene on a dark and stormy night, in a big, foreboding house on a hill, with a weapon in every room (a candlestick, a rope, a lead pipe).
You do all of this, and you get Clue, one of the silliest, strangest, and most delightful whodunnit capers out there.
Clue first charmed, and perhaps befuddled, audiences in 1985, back when toy IPs were rapidly being adapted for the silver screen (think The Care Bears Movie, My Little Pony: The Movie, G.I. Joe: The Movie — the list goes on). First-time director and writer Jonathan Lynn recalled in a 2023 interview with Entertainment Weekly how he hadn’t quite known what to do with the film’s script. “I was the sixth writer,” said Lynn. “They’d hired several who had given up and returned the money… but I couldn’t really see what to do because it’s a board game… I felt it was a bit of a straitjacket.”
The result was an hour-and-a-half feature that follows six dinner guests who, after accepting a mysterious invitation to an isolated mansion, realize that they are all being blackmailed by someone who knows all their dark secrets. Things immediately go awry when the lights suddenly go off, the dinner party’s left with a dead body, and the motley crew must discover the murderer’s identity before it’s too late.
Say what you will about Clue, but every member of its over-the-top ensemble cast certainly delivered. Curry, who by that point had been known to play smooth-talking, sinister eccentrics (Case in point, The Rocky Horror Picture Show), gave a commanding, albeit subdued, performance as the mansion’s butler Wadsworth. Madeline Kahn as the inscrutable, mysterious Mrs. White was just as iconic, especially with her final “Flames, flames” crash out in one of the film’s three endings.
And yes, in pure Clue fashion, the movie has three separate endings, and theaters were instructed to show only one during screenings. While you can now watch Clue with all three endings played back-to-back, audiences during its initial release left cinemas scratching their heads, wondering how they’d all seen a different movie.
Was Clue a success when it first came out? No, far from it. It grossed a rough total of $14.6 million, which didn’t make up for the movie’s $15 million budget. But it’s now something of a cult classic, with fans worldwide still able to quote some of the film’s best lines (My favorite is Michael McKean’s Mr. Green shouting, “I’m gonna go home and sleep with my wife!”). It’s silly, it’s strange, and, even 40 years later, Clue remains one of the funniest examples of how something as mundane as a board game can ascend to the status of a comedy classic.
