#20 Murder By Death

January 20, 2021
Murder By Death (1976) **
TCM
Free
Wildcard

Here’s the thing, this movie is one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. I didn’t get all of the jokes and references at the time, I had never seen Nick and Nora Charles, for example, but I knew Sam Spade and Poirot, and I loved Neil Simon. This was 100% my kind of movie. Truman Capote was hilarious! There was an old Elsa Lanchester and a very young James Cromwell! Maggie Smith and David Niven! (this month ended up being an accidental Maggie Smith in Mysteries in the 1970s Fest) Peter Falk and Eileen Brennan! Alec Guinness! I mean, what a terrific movie.

But I forgot one thing. Peter Sellers in yellowface as the Charlie Chan spoof character, Sidney Wang. It is remarkably hard to watch. It is incredibly unfunny and awful. It is so hard to believe that even after blackface was pretty much gone, yellowface was still around even through the 1980s, see Joel Grey in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985). Of course, now we have yellowface where white actors are cast in roles that are supposed to be Asian without putting the makeup on them, but is that much better?

Now, you could look at it in a couple of ways. Charlie Chan was always played by a white guy in yellowface, so in doing a spoof of it, having it be a white guy is traditional. If they had actually made that a part of the plot, unmasking him as being secretly white, you could have gotten by with that. Also, there were no Asian stars as big as the rest of the stars in the picture, so who could have been cast? Keye Luke being the obvious choice, but he wasn’t as big a name as Peter Sellers, who was famous for doing big makeup roles like this. But the reason there were no big Asian stars was because if there was a starring Asian role, it didn’t go to an Asian person, so that was a never-ending problem.

I wondered what actual Asian-American actor, Richard Narita, playing Wang’s son, thought about it. I mean, he also did three episodes of Kung Fu, so it was not particularly new to his career. Was he glad to be working? Was he excited to be in a movie with all these big stars? Almost all of his scenes were with Peter Sellers, who was a great talent, did he think he was lucky? Or did he also wonder why he had to stand next to a white actor made up to look like him, speaking pigeon English, and pretend that wasn’t insulting?

With some problematic films, you can look at it as being a trope of the time, and maybe it’s only in a little bit of the movie and you can watch the rest of it and judge the parts that don’t have a racist stereotype in it, but in this movie, it’s in the whole movie, and it’s 1976, not 1936. We really should have known better. 

I’m sorry to say, this movie that I used to love, is almost unwatchable in 2021.