In January, 1973, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times flew to Nice, France, to interview the director Herbert Ross about “The Last of Sheila,” a mystery picture that he was shooting on the Côte d’Azur, much of which took place on a luxurious, hundred-and-sixty-five-foot yacht called H.M.S. Malahne. The gilded ship, which was built in England in 1937 and once helped evacuate soldiers from Dunkirk, became something of a Hollywood fixture in the nineteen-sixties and seventies: it served as the floating production office for “Lawrence of Arabia” in Jordan, was a regular Mediterranean clubhouse for Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, and popped up in “The Last of Sheila,” as the watery summer home of a sinister film producer played by James Coburn. (There was a kernel of truth buried in this fiction: at the time of filming, H.M.S. Malahne was the property of a womanizing film producer named Sam Spiegel, who was allegedly so handsy with actresses that Billy Wilder once said that he had “velvet octopus arms.”) Dark things can happen out at sea, when people feel unmoored from both the shoreline and a landlocked sense of morality. “The Last of Sheila,” written by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim—who used to host infamous mystery parties together in New York—pushes this idea to murderous excess. A group of glamorous strangers (including Raquel Welch, Ian McShane, and Dyan Cannon) set sail, people start dying, and it’s up to the viewer to discover whodunnit. In his Los Angeles Times interview, Ross acknowledged the inherent creepiness of floating stories: “If you have a group of people on a ship,” he said, “the ship becomes a metaphor for existence, you can’t help it. . . . it’s about civilization and barbarism.”