Four decades before "Only Murders in the Building" became a TV hit, Larry Cohen wrote, produced and directed "See China and Die", a feature-length TV pilot starring Esther Rolle with the same basic premise. Always an innovator, the B-movie specialist Cohen fashioned a highly entertaining trifle here, which unfortunately was not picked up as a TV series.
Rolle plays a maid working in a Manhattan high-rise apartment building where a murder is committed. Coincidentally, her son (played by Kene Holiday, who never graduated to leading roles) is the homicide detective assigned the case, but the conceit of Cohen's screenplay is that Rolle, a mystery buff, is always way ahead of the authorities in terms of knowledge of the lives of all the denizens of the building, and applies herself to investigating it thoroughly to prove who the real murderer living there is. She even enlists her colleagues having menial jobs (minority actors) there to help out. Of course, Cohen's usual social commentary within his story is how these people, especially Rolle as a maid, are treated as invisible and sorely underestimated by the big-shots. His offbeat sense of humor is also on display in spoofing murder mysteries plus in-jokes.
It's a delightful little movie, peppered with terrific character actors in the supporting cast, many of them suspects, like Fritz Weaver, Andrew Duggan, Frank Converse, Paul Dooley, Jean Marsh and Laurence Luckinbill. The cops arrest the innocent building super Migue Pinero, played by the playwright Miguel Pinero (whose "Short Eyes" became a fine indie movie starring Bruce Davison). Also in the cast is Jane Hitchcock, the famous late '60s model whose only other acting role was co-starring in Bogdanovich's "Nickeldeon".
One of Cohen's trademark modes from his indie movies is on display ah he uses guerrilla filmmaking techniques here: shooting on the NYC streets without permits, in a key scene in the Diamond district in which Kene confronts an art forger, followed by a foot chase, with dozens of ordinary pedestrians on the crowded sidewalk gawking at the action (unpaid extras). This is a technique that soon got Cohen in big trouble when he shot his horror movie "Q" in 1981 with helicopter scenes at the Chrysler building that got him kicked out of town for potentially endangering folks. He also includes an action sequence her spotlighting the Giant Iguana sculpture that was once atop the Lone Star Cafe in Greenwich Village, after Paul Dooley performs a country song at the venue.
