By Steve Sailer
12/24/2022
See How They Run is a movie now on streaming that riffs on Agatha Christie’s murder mystery play The Mousetrap (a title derived from that of the play within a play in Hamlet) that has run for 29,000 performances on London’s West End since 1952, and on Tom Stoppard’s brilliant parody of Christie called The Real Inspector Hound.
A delegation from Hollywood is in London in 1953 to begin turning The Mousetrap into a film noir movie, but they all hate the play and have discordant ideas of how to revamp it for the American audience. For example, Adrien Brody plays an obnoxious Hollywood director who wants the climax to be the Scotland Yard inspector shooting it out, guns blazing, with the bad guy. The supercilious gay black English screenwriter played by David Oyelowo informs him that English coppers aren’t armed.
There are a ridiculous number of blacks in the cast — e.g., Agatha Christie’s archaeologist husband is black — perhaps as compensation for Christie’s most popular novel And Then There Were None referencing a nursery rhyme using the N-word. But there’s no attempt to make this movie any more realistic than the two hyper-stylized plays it is based upon, so that seems okay to me.
My view is that the type of show determines how racially realistic the casting should be. Operas are pretty random in terms of casting since what matters most is singing ability, and the whole genre is pretty nuts anyway. Feature film biopics, in contrast, need realistic-looking casting: e.g., Joaquin Phoenix as Ridley Scott’s upcoming Napoleon seems plausible, while Cillian Murphy as Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Robert Oppenheimer could be very good — high cheekbones! — or not good — Nolan’s pal Murphy is Irish, not Jewish. We shall see.
This extremely stagey movie falls toward the operatic end of the spectrum.
And Oyelowo is pretty funny in a role much like a super snobbish half-black Anglo-Irishman I knew in MBA school who, when I asked him what he expected in the 1982 World Cup, informed me that only louts cared about soccer, while he of course, being a gentleman, followed cricket.
But then the annoying Hollywood machers start getting murdered and Scotland Yard is called in.
Sam Rockwell plays the lead, Inspector Stoppard (nudge, nudge), and Saoirse Ronan is his righthand woman, Constable Stalker.
Saoirse is a delight.
So it’s a good movie, right? I mean, who ever heard of Sam Rockwell being bad in anything? He was great in Moon, he was great in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and he was ideal as George W. Bush in Vice.
Oh, well, in See How They Run, Rockwell is a snooze as the depressed and hung-over detective. I wouldn’t have believed Rockwell could be dull if I hadn’t seen it.
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