If you’ve never seen the movie Clue (based on the board game of the same name), stop reading this post and go watch it. It’s a great comedy and a beautiful visual portrayal of a classic murder mystery setting.

Just as in the board game, there are six guests at a dinner party: Mr. Green, Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum, Mrs. Peacock, Colonel Mustard, and Mrs. White. Before long, Mr. Body is killed and the guests need to figure out who killed him.

While that’s enough for a board game, the movie does have a bit more setup and that’s what I’d like to discuss.

The movie is set in New England in 1954, and introduces several new characters. There is Wadsworth the butler, Yvette the maid, a cook, a motorist, a policeman, and a singing telegram girl. All of these except for Wadsworth eventually end up murdered as well.

While the board game doesn’t need to specify why the dinner party is happening or how well the guests know each other, the movie can’t be so threadbare. The guests are all strangers to each other and were invited to the dinner party because they were all being blackmailed by Mr. Body.

This setup solves several problems caused by the decision to make the guests strangers to each other. The first is why they’re all here; it is very rare to give a dinner party to complete strangers. True, it is also not the most common for everyone at a dinner party to know each other, but the reverse is even more unusual. Furthermore, if all of the people are strangers they will probably have some connection such as all being in the same profession, or all physicists working on the same problem, or something like that.

The other problem it solves brought up by everyone being strangers is that it provides a motive for murder. Strangers do not, as a rule, have a reason for murdering each other. Blackmail victims have, almost by definition, a compelling reason for murder.

The movie does not manage to incorporate the element of the board game of determining the room and murder weapon. While the former could be a bit defensible, so long as you have the body it would be almost impossible to not be able to tell whether someone was shot, stabbed, strangled, or hit by a blunt instrument. (It could be possible to be in some doubt as to whether the blunt instrument was a wrench, a candlestick, or a lead pipe.) The location of the murder is a bit more workable as an unknown, though even that requires a fair amount of creativity. Unfortunately, the movie setup, which keeps all of the suspects together until Mr. Body is found (definitely) dead, doesn’t really permit this ambiguity. A setup in which the guests mingled in different rooms and moved about would have lent itself far better to making it a question of in which room Mr. Body was killed.

All this taken into account, Clue did an admirable job of making a go of a premise that was designed for a board game. It’s silly, of course, but it leans into this silliness to make a movie which is a great deal of fun, while putting in a decent amount of effort to come as close as possible to taking its premise seriously. It has plot holes, to be sure, but they’re not gaping plot holes. And that’s a lot better than most attempts at this movie would have come.