Theater: Slight Case of Murder

A Shot in the Dark, adapted for Broadway by Harry Kurnitz from Marcel Achard’s Paris hit L’Idiote, combines bedroom farce with murder mystery. The sex and suspense are unevenly blended, but a sharpshooter cast, headed by Julie Harris and Walter Matthau, drills the evening acceptably full of laughs.

Julie is a chambermaid (Josefa) who is found in the nude (her favorite outfit) and unconscious, with only one accessory, a revolver. Beside her lies the dead body of her lover, a Spanish chauffeur who used to beat her “but never when he was drinking.” They both worked for an aristocratic Paris banking family, the Beaurevers; the magistrate, influenced by Beaurevers’ power, is all for clapping the girl in jail, case unheard. But his young assistant (William Shatner), fired with ideals of justice, insists on investigating. What ensues, in judicial quarters of dilapidated grandeur, is an intimately candid inquiry based on the French axiom that discussion is the better part of indiscretion. It turns out that the Beaurevers belong to a low-fidelity set. Husband Benjamin (Walter Matthau) has been frolicking with Josefa himself after banking hours, and Wife Dominique (Louise Troy) has been slipping with her husband’s best friend. The question seems to be whether Josefa or Benjamin had the best motive for doing the worst to that Spanish chauffeur.

Julie Harris brings an entire patois of peasant gestures to her role, including a session of silently mouthing something like the Marseillaise when the wheels of justice grind too slowly. Even when the script asks to be played by leer, her gamin charm turns it into innocent merriment, as when she mimics her active lover: “He’d just tear and rip every which way, and I hate sewing.” But there are always traces of the Harris poignance, a little girl lost and a trifle afraid, waking up in beds she never made.

The second and solidest act of the play is commandeered by Walter Matthau in a brilliant portrayal of a patrician whose blood has been blue for so long that it has curdled. Haughty, unutterably bored, pompous, his face and his talk seem ravaged by Bourbonic plague—a snob’s snob who becomes human under stress.

Patrons of A Shot in the Dark must be prepared to swallow some dialogue with the rugged flavor of vin ordinaire, and the end of the play tends to dribble away. But most of this Gallic murder-comedy is estate-bottled, kept at a steady bed-and-courtroom temperature and poured to a farce-connoisseur’s taste.