Tom George’s See How They Run is a film about a film based on a play. Initially I thought it was a film based on a play about a film based on a play, which would obviously have been a much more pleasingly symmetrical arrangement. But it turns out that See How They Run (the movie) is not actually based on See How They Run (the play, originally filmed back in the 1950s); who would have been so foolish as to think something like that? So perhaps (in the name of absolute clarity) we should say that See How They Run is a film not based on a play about a film (which, come to think of it, never gets made) based on a play (which does get made, and is indeed still being made eight times a week at St Martin’s Theatre in London). I’m glad we have got that straight.
The movie opens in London’s theatreland where celebrations are underway to mark the fact that Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has just had its 100th performance (these seem a touch lavish considering that 100 performances indicates the play has only been running for about three months, but I digress). Everyone is there, from producer Petula (Ruth Wilson) to star Dickie Attenborough (Harris Dickinson – it’s not the actor’s fault, but this isn’t a particularly flattering or respectful portrayal). Also around and non-fictional is film producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith), in real life possibly best remembered for The African Queen (possibly due for a remake as The African Woman King, who can tell) and Oliver! (though lovers of the weird and obscure will also be familiar with the magisterial TV hoax Alternative 3, which he executive-produced). In the movie Woolf is very interested in making a film adaptation of The Mousetrap, and various people associated with this – the screenwriter (David Oyelowo) and the director (Adrien Brody) are also at the party.
This proves to be a bad move by Brody, as – after a fracas at the party – he is murdered backstage, his corpse left on the set of the play. As he was a fairly disagreeable character, no-one is especially surprised, but the police still have to be called in. Leading the charge of the forces of law and order are lugubrious old hand Detective Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and his eager young assistant WPC Stalker (Saoirse Ronan).
What ensues is a whodunnit in the classic style, as it turns out that various parties had good reason to bear a grudge against the dead man, and various secrets are uncovered. The light of suspicion is shone into some quite unexpected places, and there is a bit more incidental mayhem, before all is done and dusted (but the film is only 98 minutes long, so there’s a limit to exactly how convoluted everything can get).
On paper is does look like a very ‘straight’ murder mystery, but from the very beginning the film has a jaunty, slightly screwball air about it which makes it very clear that we are in comedic territory at least some of the time – the presence of performers best known for their comic pedigree (Shearsmith, Charlie Cooper, Tim Key) is also a pretty big tip-off. It’s certainly not a film crying out to be taken seriously, or naturalistically – the setting is a idealised version of 1953 which in some ways more closely resembles the present day than post-war Britain (one of the film’s other historical characters, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, is played by Lucian Msamati, for instance).
If you twisted my arm and asked me to suggest a film that See How They Run is a bit similar to, my answer would not be one of the many other Christie adaptations or pastiches that have appeared in recent years – it’s actually more like Shakespeare in Love in many ways, by which I mean that the script is very carefully pitched – there is a fair degree of quite broad slapstick and wordplay, but also moments of genuine wit and erudition carefully sprinkled in (some of the jokes are so obscure that only a handful of audience members were responding to them at the screening I went to).
One of the writers on Shakespeare in Love was Tom Stoppard, and this may be partly where Sam Rockwell’s character got his name from. However, various other things – up to and included a line of dialogue where another character is described as ‘a real hound, inspector’ – lead me to suspect that this may be more a homage and reference to Stoppard’s 1968 play The Real Inspector Hound, partly a satire on The Mousetrap itself. In many ways the most distinctive thing about See How They Run is the extent to which it is stuffed with this kind of knowing self-referentiality. In the midst of one of the flashback sequences which pepper the film, a screenwriter archly proclaims that he despises the use of flashbacks in movies; he goes on to criticise the use of captions as a storytelling device – and this is, inevitably, followed by a caption. See How They Run itself starts turning into The Mousetrap adaptation Woolf is looking to produce – one of the cleverest and most impudent things about it is the way it frequently seems to be threatening to copy and thus reveal the big plot twist in Christie’s play, but in the end never actually does so. There’s a casual reference to the Rillington Place murders which really took place in London in the early 1950s – a film about them featured a notable performance from Richard Attenborough, who (as mentioned) features here as a character. There’s even a minor character who’s a stuffy butler named Fellowes, which I’m assuming is a reference to Julian Fellowes, whose Gosford Park (his best work, if you ask me) is another updated pastiche of the country-house murder-mystery genre.
Of course, once you start heading down the rabbithole this way it can be difficult to drag yourself out – the slightest little thing starts to look like a fiendishly clever in-joke. It’s also worth pointing out that the film is fast, funny, and silly enough to satisfy most audiences, regardless of their familiarity with this genre or theatrical metatextuality, mainly due to a very game set of performances – Sam Rockwell underplays things, for once, while everyone else seems very happy to put the pedal to the metal. Dame Agatha herself briefly appears, portrayed by Shirley Henderson; it is a sweet little cameo in a film I can imagine the most murderous woman in history quietly rather enjoying, if not quite admitting to approving of. It’s a rare example of a good comedy film which makes a virtue of its own cleverness, and is thus something to be applauded.