“They only approve of murderers and perverts. Which are you?”
“Both.”
—Lotte von Ornstein (Jane Carr) converses with Konrad Ludwig (Michael York) in Something for Everyone
The glittering dawn of the Swinging Seventies, now sunk for half a century in the shadowed past, unquestionably saw the emergence of two notable films in the history of queer cinema: The Boys in the Band and Something for Everyone. (Entertaining Mr. Sloane and the notorious Myra Breckinridge are two additional candidates which also come immediately to mind.) Both The Boys in the Band and Something for Everyone premiered within a year of the Stonewall Riots (an epochal liberating event in the long struggle for queer rights in the United States), Band in March 1970 and Everyone hard on its clicking heels in June. While The Boys in the Band, which was based on the path-breaking1968 off-Broadway play of the same title by the late Mart Crowley, has enjoyed a 2018 stage revival and a 2020 film remake (more an outright homage); Something for Everyone, on the other hand, has received far less attention over the years—though it has maintained a devoted cult following for five decades and was reissued on Blu-ray DVD by Kino Lorber in 2016. Especially pertinent to Crimereads, Something for Everyone is a crime film, in contrast with The Boys in the Band, where copious drop-dead looks and cutting remarks may wound but, luckily for the cast, do not actually slay. Indeed, Something for Everyone, which on its original release carried the witty and naughty tag line “The Butler Did It—To Everyone,” is a brilliant black comedy of multiple murders and other assorted malfeasance, one meriting broader remembrance by film buffs as it enters its second half-century of existence.
Something for Everyone was directed by the late legendary American theatrical producer Harold “Hal” Prince and scripted by Prince’s frequent Seventies collaborator, author and playwright Hugh Wheeler, who in the 1970s wrote the books for the acclaimed musicals A Little Night Music, Candide, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd, all of which were produced by Hal Prince. For nearly four decades Hugh Wheeler, a native Englishman born in 1912, had been a resident of the United States. In August 1933 Wheeler, then a recent graduate from the University of London, had come to the United States from England at the age of twenty-one, a fledgling writer who had been taken under the wing, as it were, by Philadelphia pharmaceutical company executive and moonlighting mystery writer Richard Wilson Webb, himself a transplanted Englishman whom Wheeler had met that summer, likely in London or Berlin. Over the next eighteen years Wheeler and Webb would live and write long and short fiction together, under the noms de plumes Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge, some of the most highly regarded names in mid-century crime writing. Many of the Patrick Quentin novels were filmed in the United States and other countries, the most prominent of the American films being 20th Century Fox’s DeLuxe Color Black Widow (1954), based on the novel of the same name, which starred Ginger Rogers, Van Heflin, Gene Tierney, George Raft and Peggy Ann Garner and was touted as the first murder mystery filmed in “Breathtaking Cinemascope.”
After Hugh Wheeler parted ways, both professionally and personally, with Richard Webb in 1951, he continued periodically to publish Patrick Quentin crime novels, but a decade later he made a major shift in writing when he had two “mainstream” plays about human relationships, Big Fish, Little Fish and Look: We’ve Come Through performed on Broadway. The former play, which was directed by Wheeler’s good friend John Gielgud, netted two Tony Awards, including best director for Gielgud. In 1966, Wheeler’s stage adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s mordant murder novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) was performed on Broadway, but the play was a critical and commercial failure, closing after only nine performances. However, the critical success of Something for Everyone four years later would relaunch Wheeler’s writing career, leading over the rest of the decade to his highly felicitous collaborations with Hal Prince (and composer Stephen Sondheim) and his heavy involvement with scripting the smash Oscar-winning musical Cabaret (1972), directed by Bob Fosse, with whom in 1963 Wheeler had briefly worked on an aborted musical version of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Wheeler’s script of Something for Everyone is ostensibly based on Harry Kressing’s 1965 novel The Cook, but as author Ethan Mordden has noted in On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (2016), “Wheeler simply used Kressing’s premise of an employee gaining power over a family and built upon it a campy black comedy in which servant Michael York uses bisexual charm to seduce, destroy, or kill everyone in his way as he takes over a noble but impoverished [Bavarian] family.” In the words of the films leading man, Michael York (in his 1991 autobiography Accidentally on Purpose), in Wheeler’s hands it became “sexual appetites rather than alimental ones that now animated the plot.” A decade after Wheeler had circumspectly introduced queer characters and themes to Broadway in his stage plays Big Fish, Little Fish and Look: We’ve Come Through he now was able, in an era of expansive sexual revolution, to deal more directly with queerer aspects of the human condition in Something for Everyone.
The film opens with Michael York’s mysterious character, the magnetically blond and muscularly long-legged Konrad Ludwig, bicycling through the Bavarian countryside, clad provocatively in a partially unbuttoned scarlet shirt and scanty khaki shorts. Catching glimpse of a magnificent fanciful castle, like something out of a fairy story he read as a child (the real life Neuschwanstein Castle, built in the nineteenth century as a residence for King Ludwig II, who was himself homosexually inclined), Konrad immediately begins hatching irresistible plans for what comes to seem his inevitable dominion. As Michael York writes, Konrad is “the 1970s version of the New Man—greedy, opportunistic, materialistic and downright immoral. Against him, the old orders—aristocratic, political, moral, whatever—had no protection.”
Konrad’s prey are the castle’s inhabitants, the noble but impoverished von Ornstein family: widowed, middle-aged countess Herthe (Angela Lansbury), her glumly attractive son Helmuth (Anthony Higgins, or Anthony Corlan as he was then known), and her daughter Lotte, a precociously opinionated but socially awkward sixteen-year-old (Jane Carr). Through murder and other machinations Konrad manages to insinuate himself into the Ornstein household, first as a footman and then as the castle’s majordomo. He then proceeds to bed both Helmuth and glumly attractive Anneliese Pleschke (Heidelinde Weis), the bored daughter of vulgar nouveaux riche parents who had hoped to secure for themselves the Castle Ornstein, until they found to their dismay that it was entailed. Konrad’s solution to the dilemmas of the old money (and since the war practically no money) von Ornsteins and the new money Pleschkes is to marry off to each other Helmuth and Anneliese, all the while continuing to make himself sexually accessible to both groom and bride, both of whom have absolutely no interest in each other, remaining utterly mesmerized with the magnetic majordomo. Konrad does indeed, seemingly, have something for everyone. When this charming man’s plans receive a sudden jolting setback, however, he finds himself compelled to resort to extreme measures in order to realize his personal vision of a new world order. How will this deadly sexual imbroglio end?
Although not nearly as “in your face” as The Boys in the Band, whose cast consisted almost entirely of gay characters (and the sexuality of the one nominally straight character is very much in question), Something for Everyone definitely anticipated the modern era in its depiction of its cheerfully pansexual central character, Konrad, whose sexuality seemingly alters in an instant, chameleon-like, depending on the circumstance of the moment. It is this quality of Something for Everyone which prompted the late film critic John Simon to pan the film, in one of the most notorious of the splenetic critic’s notorious reviews. Accusing Something for Everyone of constituting “a prime example of disguised homosexuality at its distorting worst,” a revolted Simon went on to write condemningly:
What is objectionable [about the film] is the covert slanting of the film toward making heterosexual relations unappetizing, and toward turning moral values upside down….
….Miss Lansbury looks like an aging female impersonator gone sloppy….God only knows where the notion that Miss Lansbury has class originated….She is, in fact, common, and her mugging…and camping around merely make her into that most degraded thing an outré actress can decline into: a fag hag….
….As played by Jane Carr…and directed by Prince, [Lotte] is an unmitigatedly repugnant weirdo, a sort of overweight child bride of Dracula.
….Michael York is a supremely monotonous actor and has, moreover, the head of a blonde rat. But he has good legs which, in mini-lederhosen, the camera keeps lovingly hugging. His sex with the young son (Anthony Corlan, a sullen, dimensionless performer) is also lovingly dwelt on; whereas heterosexual sex is always shown as hasty, sordid hugger-mugger.
I submit that the entire film exemplifies a kind of vengeance on the heterosexual world by a [homosexual] mentality resenting its real or alleged compulsion to dissemble and hide its predilections. In retaliation, anything that the so-called normal world considers healthy and decent—and some of it, so help us, is healthy and decent—is systematically trodden underheel. Something for Everyone…is a thoroughly unsavory film.
With gratuitous insults and epithets seemingly on hand for everyone, Simon dismissed Hugh Wheeler himself—the instigator, in his view, of the film’s “concealment and falsifying strategies”—as “a flabby, floundering playwright.” Happily, however, other reviewers took far different takes, lauding the film in high terms. Perhaps not altogether surprisingly, film critic and Myra Breckinridge co-star Rex Reed (of whom John Simon that year had nastily deadpanned “his acting is on par with his writing”) deemed Something for Everyone a “funny, baroque and visually enchanting exercise in black comedy” and lavished praise on both Lansbury (“magnificent as a fading countess with a castle in need of repairs”) and York (“all beautiful, silky, deadly charm and lean, hungry ambition as the young Machiavelli”), while Judith Crist proclaimed the film a “deliciously macabre fable” and similarly praised Lansbury and York.
Indeed, both Lansbury, who received a Golden Globe nomination as best actress for Something for Everyone, and York are superbly suited to their roles in the film, as are, in the parts of the younger von Ornsteins, a teenaged Jane Carr, who was then coming off a fine performance in the film adaptation of the Oscar-winning film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), and Anthony Higgins, who the same year happened to play the youthful romantic lead in Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula, one in its popular series of lurid English horror films starring Christopher Lee in the ghoulish title role. (Carr and Higgins respectively were only nineteen and twenty-two at the time of the filming of Something for Everyone, to York’s twenty-seven.) Possibly Carr is best known in the United States for her amusing four year stint on actor Judd Hirsch’s American sitcom Dear John as a therapist with a great fondness for probing people about their “sexual problems” and Higgins for his brief supporting role as swaggering Nazi villain Major Gobler in Steven Spielburg’s and George Lucas’ classic homage to vintage serial thrillers, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
Something for Everyone bears resemblance not merely to superbly costumed and coiffed gay-friendly melodramas like Dynasty but to serious and psychologically probing tales of scheming, class-disrupting menials like The Servant (1963) and the recent best picture Oscar winner Parasite (2019).Certainly Something for Everyone was a hit with gay audiences at the time (and has remained so since), even if it proved not quite to the more squeamish taste of many straight (if not straitlaced) filmgoers, making only about two million dollars, in modern value, in the United States, where it played to the urban art house crowd. One internet reviewer of the film rapturously has recalled seeing Something for Everyone in its original theatrical release, adding fervently: “Let me tell you, when Angela Lansbury appeared on screen about to board a train in her white satin traveling suit and matching stewardess style cap, there was a collective gasp from the audience—admittedly mostly gay men. You’d never seen anything like it EVER. And you never saw anything like it again until [the nighttime American television soap opera] Dynasty in the ‘80s.”
Similarly, at the highly gay-friendly pop culture website Poseidon’s Underworld, the webmaster on February 28, 2020 posted a voluminously-detailed and highly laudatory review of Something for Everyone, packing the page with gorgeous color pictures from the film. A commenter to the review recalled, “I saw Cabaret when it came out as a young gayling so was entranced by everything about it. Sometime in the ‘80s it appeared on a double bill at a local repertory theater with Something for Everyone, so I saw them together….this was a very fun romp and well worth another viewing.” For his part Ethan Mordden approvingly pronounced Something for Everyone “one of the gayest creations ever” and concluded that this was so “entirely because of [Hugh] Wheeler” (though having “gay parish favorite” Angela Lansbury on hand surely did not hurt). The tale of the “beautiful young man who uses sex as a weapon” in his ruthless rise to eminence and power Mordden termed a “classic gay trope.”
Yet despite its undeniable campy transgressive fun, Something for Everyone bears resemblance not merely to superbly costumed and coiffed gay-friendly melodramas like Dynasty but to serious and psychologically probing tales of scheming, class-disrupting menials like The Servant (1963) and the recent best picture Oscar winner Parasite (2019). The film’s meticulous and devious plot construction with its apt twist ending owes as much to Hugh Wheeler’s background in crime fiction as it does to his queer sensibility. Interestingly, in this context, Wheeler wrote his friend John Gielgud that the far brasher and crasser Boys in the Band had simply disgusted him when he saw it. While Band undeniably has great raw emotional power, Something for Everyone has, like its author, the quality of finesse, lightly pricking viewers like a wickedly wrought jeweled stiletto.
In his autobiography Michael York fondly recalled Hugh Wheeler’s “fey English self-effacement” and “endearing impression of helplessness”—the author was unable after years of typing his own manuscripts to change the ribbons on his typewriters—yet in an interview recently York stressed to me the quality of Wheeler’s “tremendously organized mind,” which in Something for Everyone produced an “intelligent,” “powerful” and “literary” script with a particularly fine “aria” of lament and acceptance given over to Angela Lansbury, when her character Countess von Ornstein finally comes to the brutal realization that “Without money there is nothing. Nothing.” In truth the film—an inverted crime story with something to say to everyone, whatever their exact position on the sexual spectrum might be—constitutes Hugh Wheeler’s last great contribution to the crime and mystery genre, unless one counts his book for the powerful, blood-soaked musical Sweeney Todd, which owes its grim inception to the Victorian penny dreadful—an altogether less subtle sort of beast, one which may not be for everyone.
