A corpse for dessert
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | A corpse for dessert |
| Original title | Murder by Death |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1976 |
| length | 95 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK from 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Robert Moore |
| script | Neil Simon |
| production | Ray Stark |
| music | Dave Grusin |
| camera | David M. Walsh |
| cut | John F. Burnett |
| occupation | |
| |
A Corpse for Dessert is a 1976 star-studded American film parody that satirizes five famous crime novel heroes and the genre that surrounds them .
action
The eccentric millionaire Lionel Twain invites the five greatest living detectives and their companions to his castle to prove that he is the greatest criminalist of all time. He predicts that someone will die on the dot of midnight and that no one will be able to solve the crime. Otherwise he would pay them a million dollars. Everyone is sure in advance that only Twain can be the culprit, as he accurately predicts the time and cause of death (twelve stitches with a butcher's knife). First, however, is eaten, which becomes a rather unusual event due to the unconstructive collaboration between the blind butler Jamesir Bensonmum and the deaf-mute cook Yetta.
Everyone is surprised when it is Twain, of all people, who is murdered at midnight. Since the butler has already been found murdered and the cook turns out to be a robot, the perpetrator can logically only be among the detectives and their companions, who all have a motive, as can be seen in the course of the exploration, which was accompanied by surprising and bizarre events of the house.
Finally, the guests come to rest, with everyone and their companion almost falling victim to an insidious attempted murder. Eventually they all arrive one after the other in Twain's study, but the butler is sitting at the desk, lively and without blindness. Everyone now gives their own theory about the true identity of the butler and thus the murderer and demands the million dollars, but then the butler takes off a face mask. He's Lionel Twain, who just pretended to be dead and now threatens to reveal the detectives' failure to the world, and so no one will get the reward. While the guests leave in frustration, Twain lights a cigarette and, after removing another mask, turns out to be Yetta, the supposedly deaf and dumb robot cook.
background
A corpse for dessert became a cult film , partly because of the star cast with Alec Guinness , Peter Falk , Peter Sellers , David Niven and Maggie Smith , but also because of the bizarre humor. Screenwriter Neil Simon wanted to create a parody of all known crime novel heroes and make their quirks and quirks the motif of the film. Towards the end of the film, the following line of dialogue appears, which explains Simon's reasons for creating the story:
- You crime heroes have been so clever for so long that you feel like gods now. You are fooling your readers with the cheapest showmanship. You torment them with conclusions drawn from their fingers that don't make sense. On the last five pages you introduce characters that are not mentioned in the whole book with a single stroke of the pen. Information is withheld so that nobody can guess who the perpetrator is.
The film makes all of this its own; the viewer searches in vain for a meaning in the course of the plot and above all in the deliberately completely confusing ending.
The eminent writer Truman Capote , who plays the antagonist of the detectives as Lionel Twain , on the other hand , wrote a factual novel on the subject of murder with Cold Blood in 1966, which got by without these tricks and thus revolutionized the genre from the ground up: Lionel Twain is rightly allowed to end up of the film therefore call it the greatest of all criminalists .
The special humor of the film lies in the meeting of the sometimes bizarre characters. So the blind butler and the deaf-mute cook must work together; Inspector Sidney Wang confuses his colleagues with his twisted words and poor knowledge of grammar, so that he has to put up with the question of how such a brilliant detective can not use the particular article correctly.
characters
| figure | Parody of | actor |
|---|---|---|
| Inspector Sidney Wang from Catalina Willie Wang from Japan |
Charlie Chan "Number One Son", Lee Chan |
Peter Sellers Richard Narita |
| Dick and Dora Charleston from New York |
Nick and Nora Charles from the Thin Man series |
David Niven Maggie Smith |
| Jessica Marbles from Sussex nurse Miss Withers |
Miss Marple Hildegarde Withers |
Elsa Lanchester Estelle Winwood |
| Sam Diamond from San Francisco Tess Skeffington |
Sam Spade from The Falcon's Trail Spades Secretary Effie Perine |
Peter Falk Eileen Brennan |
| Milo Perrier from Brussels Marcel |
Hercule Poirot Hercule Poirot's assistant Hastings |
James Coco James Cromwell |
In a scene cut out for the theatrical version, two characters appear, the parodies of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson pose. The scene was reintegrated for a US TV broadcast. The Holmes parody was played by Keith McConnell , while that of Dr. Watson by Richard Peel .
Reviews
“ Intelligently worked out and surprisingly pointed crime comedy. "
“ This original parody offers the connoisseur a lot of swipes at classic crime literature. Author Neil Simon takes the game of logic so far that in the end any rational approach to explanations must fail. He makes fun of inferior crime novels that use lazy tricks and stupid coincidences to pull their solutions out of the hat. So anyone who wants to 'understand' this film is in the wrong boat. But the others will have a great time. "
synchronization
The film was released in German cinemas on September 17, 1976 as a corpse for dessert . The synchronization came from the West Berlin Rainer Brandt Filmproduktions GmbH . Rainer Brandt directed the dubbing , wrote the dialogue book and also spoke the role of Marcel himself . The linguistic jokes differ only slightly from the original English version. However, not all English puns could be translated into German. For example: Mr. and Mrs. Charleston live in Inspector "Wang's wing", in the original "Wang's wing".
The film came out in the GDR on October 14, 1977 under the title Excuse me, are you the murderer? in the cinemas. For this purpose a new German dubbed version was made by the DEFA studio for synchronization. Inge Lindner directed the dubbing , the dialogue script came from Friedel Hohnwald .
| role | actor | Voice actor (Brandt) | Voice actor (DEFA) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jamesir Bensonmum | Alec Guinness | Friedrich W. Building School | Eugen Schaub |
| Lionel Twain | Truman Capote | Friedrich G. Beckhaus | Hans-Joachim Hanisch |
| Sidney Wang | Peter Sellers | Jürgen Thormann | Kurt Kachlicki |
| Willie Wang | Richard Narita | Thomas Danneberg | Klaus Bergatt |
| Dick Charleston | David Niven | Friedrich Schoenfelder | Wolfgang Lohse |
| Dora Charleston | Maggie Smith | Dagmar Altrichter | Margit Schaumäker |
| Jessica Marbles | Elsa Lanchester | Erna Haffner | Hanna Rieger |
| Miss Withers | Estelle Winwood | Tina Eilers | Trude Brentina |
| Sam Diamond | Peter Falk | Harald Juhnke | Helmut Schellhardt |
| Tess Skeffington | Eileen Brennan | Barbara Ratthey | Heath Kipp |
| Milo Perrier | James Coco | Klaus Miedel | Hans-Joachim Hegewald |
| Marcel | James Cromwell | Rainer Brandt | Gerd Grasse |
Web links
- Murder by Death in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- A body for dessert atrotten tomatoes(English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Keith McConnell - Biography. In: IMDb . Retrieved June 2, 2019 .
- ↑ A corpse for dessert. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed June 2, 2019 .
- ↑ A corpse for dessert. In: prisma.de . Retrieved June 2, 2019 .
- ↑ A corpse for dessert. In: synchronkartei.de. German synchronous index , accessed on June 2, 2019 .