This film is very funny especially if you look at it from the perspective of how ridiculously pretentious it makes the culinary world of Europe look with its uppity chefs and their overly flamboyant creations at the five star restaurants and hotels, leading to some very funny murders that may not create an appetite but will garnish the viewer with plenty of laughs. The film starts off with the outrageously preposterous Robert Morley, a food critic of enormous proportions snobbishly walking along, insulting various people he encounters including his doctor who goes through his list of ailments, basically informing Morley that his extreme weight is leading him to a slow and painful death. Morley hysterically proclaims that he'd rather be dead then go without all of the things in life he likes, reminding me of the saying that everything people enjoy in life are either illegal, immoral or fattening. One thing that is not illegal is the performance that Morley gives, one that should have gotten him an Oscar nomination, one of the funniest performances worth an Oscar alongside John Gielgud in "Arthur" and Robert Preston in "Victor/Victoria".
While the stars of the film, George Segal and Jacqueline Bisset, are quite good, Morley is so commanding that he even gets to command the screen with his own musical theme, a march that is very catchy. The concoctions that the chefs make are also worth seeing because some of them are so outlandishly outrageous (especially a cake that is lit on fire) that they get giggles simply because the viewer couldn't imagine having such things in front of them on a plate let alone biting into them. As each of the chefs gets a very funny and somewhat painful demise, the black nature of the comedy gets more demented, reminding me of Morley in "Theater of Blood" getting his comeuppance for insulting ham actor Vincent Price. One of the comic highlights is a food fight early in the film where Morley looks on in absolute delight, his justified discussed over the people involved filling another kind of appetite. I can say that this film has improved with age for me, seeming better each time I watch it, an artistic triumph of sophistication mixed with bad taste, although when I first watched the film, I guessed the culprit quite easily. Still, there are plenty of surprises simply because of everything going on, not because of how it is resolved.
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