Is 'See How They Run' a Play Within a Play Within a Play?
Why have we never seen a film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, described as the longest-running play in history? A clause in the contract, demanded by Christie, requires that six months elapse after the play run ends before a film can appear. The play is still running over seventy years after it premiered in London’s West End. Ergo, no film yet.
But See How They Run evades that contractual requirement by recursion. Yes, I said recursion, more commonly known as a play-within-a-play. You know, like that fateful play presented in Act III Scene 2 of Hamlet when players enact a man murdering the king and taking his place at the Danish court right in front of the new king who did exactly that. A play Hamlet calls “The Mousetrap” because he wants to catch a rat by observing the demeanor of his new step-daddy when he sees a theatrical representation of his own evil murder of Hamlet’s dad and usurpation of the crown and the queen.
Christie’s play, originally a radio play written for the British royal family, was called “Three Blind Mice.” But adapted for the theater she changed the name to The Mousetrap. So now we have this recursive film version called See How They Run. The movie follows the investigation of a murder among the film people trying to make a movie of the Christie play. The movie-within-a-movie is subject to that real clause in the real contract mentioned above, just as is the real movie we’re watching.
This movie is so clever I had to watch it twice to start to pick up all the clever things the writer, Mark Chappell, and the director, Tom George, pull off. The interweaving of planes of reality – real background events, other detective stories, elements of the drama, the movie story and even you, dear spectator – is smashing, brilliant, ace … choose your favorite Brit slang as you chuckle and order another cup of tea, milk and two sugars, please.
The real-life murder of Dennis O’Neill, a foster child killed by the beatings and mistreatment of his foster parents, inspired The Mousetrap. O’Neill’s younger brother appears in the play and the movie, so a real character from the source material migrates into Christie’s play and then into the movie about trying to make a movie about it. The movie depicts the Ambassador Theatre in London’s West End, real location where The Mousetrap ran before moving next door to St. Martin’s Theatre. Posters visible in the movie background name Richard Attenborough as the player of Detective Trotter in the play, correct as he was the first to play the role. He’s a character in the movie and the play inside the movie. The real, semi-real and fictional are mixing.
Adding another plane of reality, the movie refers to its own technology of production. The screenwriter of the aborted film-within-a-film, Mervyn Cocker-Norris, expresses horror at director Leo Köpernick’s idea of using split-screen, a dated film technique, in the proposed film. Cocker-Norris exclaims that would be as bad as using screen titles, common in the silent era. The film, the real film, immediately flashes a title on the screen. And it uses split-screen over and over. The movie opens with the movie director speaking in voiceover, but this reference to film noir tropes gets twisted in ways you have to see the movie to understand.
Is all this a form of breaking-the-fourth-wall, a wink-wink at the movie audience as we share recognition that this is only a play, within a play, within a play? To make it clear, the movie ends with an explicit fourth wall break. Or is all this world-mixing simply the stuff of parody? Classic detective movie parodies don’t construct all these complicated wormholes between planes of reality. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, the 1982 Carl Reiner-Steve Martin parody of noir, edits in clips of classic noir films as explicit intertextuality. Who Framed Roger Rabbit mixes a noir parody plotline with invented and ‘real’ cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck. But See How They Run takes this playfulness to complex heights, upping the level of play for genre-conscious detective stories.
Is it recursive? Here’s a funny example of recursion: It was a dark and stormy night and they said, tell us a story. So the storyteller said, it was a dark and stormy night and they said, tell us a story. So that storyteller said … Let me know what you think.