The Last of Sheila is a 1973 American whodunnit mystery film directed and produced by Herbert Ross and written by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim.

[5] On a one-week Mediterranean pleasure cruise aboard the yacht of movie producer Clinton Greene, the guests include: actress Alice Wood; her talent-manager husband Anthony Wood; talent agent Christine; screenwriter Tom Parkman and his wife Lee; and director Philip Dexter.

Christine reveals that when she was a secretary in the film industry, during the Second Red Scare she informed on left-leaning actors to further her career and become a talent agent.

On the final night of the cruise, the crew and most of the guests go to a party onshore, but Dexter, who brought no money, remains on the ship.

Parkman sees lights on the ship blinking on and off, and returns to find Dexter pondering loose ends of earlier events.

Dexter suspects that Lee "killed" a dead body, and that the real murderer rearranged the scene to implicate her.

After figuring out what the game was the first night, Parkman actually changed out his own card – "YOU are an ALCOHOLIC", the missing A – for a more condemning one, "YOU are a HIT-AND-RUN KILLER", knowing both secrets applied to Lee.

He later arranged for Lee to see that new card, and think the game's purpose was to expose her for her role in Sheila's death.

Then, he spiked her bottle of bourbon with sleeping pills, and after she drank it, carried her body into the bathtub and slit her wrists, making it seem like a suicide.

Parkman tries to kill Dexter, but is stopped by Christine, who had come up to the yacht for a sexual rendezvous and has heard their entire conversation.

[4] The movie was inspired by an irregular series of elaborate, real-life scavenger hunts Sondheim and Perkins arranged for their show business friends (including Lee Remick and George Segal) in Manhattan in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

[7] The climax of one hunt was staged in the lobby of a seedy flophouse, where participants heard a skipping LP record endlessly repeating the first line of the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer standard "One for My Baby" ("It's quarter to three ...

The winning team eventually recognized the clue — 2:45 — and immediately headed for room 245 of the hotel, where bottles of champagne awaited them.

[11] Herbert Ross originally offered the role to Mengers herself, but she turned it down, claiming too many of her clients were out of work.

In turn, she announced she was suing Herbert Ross for assault and battery as a result of an incident in her dressing room.

Warner Bros later issued a statement supporting Ross and criticising Welch for her "public utterances".

[17] Mason told a newspaper at the time that Welch was "the most selfish, ill-mannered, inconsiderate actress that I've ever had the displeasure of working with".

"[20] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half out of 4 stars, praising the cast and script, and saying, "It's the kind of movie that wraps you up in itself, and absorbs you at the very time you're being impressed by its cleverness.

"[21] In a 2007 review for Empire, Kim Newman gave the film four stars, writing "It remains an underrated pleasure, a rare original film mystery (most whodunits are adapted from novels – which means your target audience already knows the solution) with dialogue as precisely turned as one of Norman Bates's twitches or Sweeney Todd's razor-rhymes.

"[22] Filmmakers Edgar Wright and Larry Karaszewski have extolled the film in recorded introductions for Turner Classic Movies and Trailers from Hell, respectively.

[23][24] Beau Flynn and Joel Silver were attached to a 2012 announcement that New Line Cinema would remake the film,[25] though the project was never produced.

[29] They went on to try to collaborate again two more times, on The Chorus Girl Murder Case and Crime and Variations, but the projects were ultimately not made.