For her part, Camp adored the French maid outfit created by Kaplan. "The genius of Jonathan Lynn was that he was able to use the assets of each person," says Camp. "I think it was so obvious that I was so well endowed that it became a perfect thing for the characters to react to my breasts." If Camp has anything resembling a regret with the role, in fact, it's this: "Why didn't I take one of those costumes home?!"

The crew found ways to have some fun as well, like when it came time to shoot the sequence in which a crystal chandelier was to fall just behind Mull's Col. Mustard. "The prop master, who was in charge of having the thing drop, also does, I guess, a very, very, very good drunk," says Mull. "He came up to me, right before we were going to do the thing, acting quite a bit tipsy, and said, 'Gah, hope to guh 'is goes ah right.' Scared the shit out of me. I thought, Oh no. No, no. This is no way to go out."

Ironically, when I bring that scene up with Lynn, he laments that he was actually too cautious. "I screwed that up, I think, because I was so frightened that there would be some accident," he says. "It should have only just missed them, and it misses them by quite a bit, and that was me not having the nerve or the confidence to trust the stunt coordinator." Lynn thinks his circumspection was largely due to the fact that John Landis was embroiled in the legal fallout from the death of three actors, including two children, from his directorial segment in 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie due to a catastrophic helicopter-related accident. "The last thing in the world that could have happened on this picture with him as the producer could have been an accident on the set, so I was being very, very cautious." (When I run this thinking by Landis, while he says he can't comment on the chandelier stunt itself — "I wasn't there" — he is surprised, and a bit touched, by Lynn's caution. "Oh, well that's interesting," he says. "I'd never heard that before, but I understand it.")

In point of fact, while Lynn certainly allowed for a loose and convivial set, he exercised the most control when it came to his script. "Jonathan is a by-the-book guy, and if it was written, that was the way we did it," says Mull. "For Madeline, of course, that's like telling Cicero not to speak, you know what I mean?" Indeed, while most Hollywood comedies today are often largely improvised, all the actors I spoke to said there was really only one time Lynn allowed anyone to significantly break from the screenplay: Madeline Kahn's "Flames on the side of my face" speech.

It lasts only 20 seconds, but for many Clue faithful, this is The Moment, when the movie passes through the threshold from genuine enjoyment to something approaching love — think Roy Scheider saying, "You're gonna need a bigger boat" in Jaws. It comes toward the very end of the film, when Mrs. White is confronted with her hatred of Yvette for sleeping with her husband. "All that was written was, 'I hated her so much that I wanted to kill her,' or something like that," says McKean, still smiling from the memory. "But she just kind of went into a fugue about hatred. She did it three or four times, and each time was funnier than the last. I thought that they could have strung a bunch of them together because they had plenty of cutaways of all of us going, What the fuck is she talking about?"

“I think Jonathan was very uncertain about it,” recalls Curry. “It was very very funny, and hard not to laugh. Flames!”

Needless to say, between the actors' natural talents, and all the concentrated time they spent having so much fun together on set and off, it really is no wonder that they played off each other so well in the film. On the other hand, all that good cheer did occasionally make it difficult for the actors to do their jobs, no more so than for Tim Curry, who often had to unfurl lengthy globs of exposition at the brisk, Howard Hawksian clip Lynn desired. "Tim is a very disciplined guy," says McKean. "Every time when Marty and I would be goofing around — we thought quietly — between takes, Tim would give us a look like, I'm trying to remember the fucking phone book here. And he can give a good look."

Curry doesn’t quite recall that moment. “It sounds a bit pompous to me,” he says with an inscrutable deadpan. But, he admits, “I did have an awful lot to remember.” The entire third act of Clue features Curry practically hyperventilating as he races around the mansion explaining how the murders took place with ever-increasing speed and hysteria. And performing it took a real toll. “I was exhausted at the end of the movie,” he says. “I actually had a sort of incident of high blood pressure towards the end, when all of the conclusions were happening, because I was running around like a mad person. They took me to the doctor and I had to take pills for a week, my blood pressure was so high. Which was very tiresome.”

The rest of the cast did not have much more to do that stand agog while watching Curry’s breakneck acting. "There were an awful lot of instances where it was impossible to keep a straight face," says Mull. "In fact, we were laughing so much, one thing that has stayed indelible in my mind is before every take of every scene, Michael McKean would say to everyone in the cast, 'Something terrible has happened here,' to try to bring us back to the reality of where we were. It got to be quite a funny little catchphrase."

"You're living in a fake world, but you try to make it real," says McKean. "It's not funny if it doesn't mean too much to the people it's happening to. It has to be completely life-or-death.…It became a kind of a comical thing to say, but really, it's that little adjustment. Here's your real life, here's the make-believe part, and we're lucky that we can differentiate."