René Clair
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The Hateful Eight (2015)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by And Then There Were None (1945)
Plot
Watching the film, I thought for the first time in years of the series of How to Host a Murder boxed games that were a brief dinner party craze when I was a child in the 1980s, though the real precedent is the body-count thriller as exemplified by Agatha Christie’s 1939 bestseller And Then There Were None (I wonder if Quentin’s copy has the original, more impolitic title?) and its various cinematic brethren.
The Hateful Eight’s premise broadly resembles Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None: strangers confined to one place, motivations and backstories concealed, trapped while the body count rises.
Tarantino's much-ballyhooed Western turns out to be a locked-room mystery, Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None" with a wintry blizzard and a lot of raunchy dialogue that leads absolutely nowhere.
So stay alert for this deliciously depraved nest of eight vipers, right out of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, if Dame Agatha had converted to pulp fiction.
"The Hateful Eight" is basically "And Then There Were None" by way of "The Wild Bunch," with MUCH more foul-mouthed and brutal guests trapped in the colorfully named Minnie's Haberdashery.
Odd as it sounds, Ayer and co-writer Skip Woods were loosely inspired by Agatha Christie’s classic mystery “And Then There Were None.”
Patterned after Agatha Christie's classic "And Then There Were None," Sabotage follows an elite DEA special ops team led by Arnold who start getting picked off one by one after their $10 million in stolen drug cartel money goes missing.
Sabotage makes the bold attempt of re-imagining Agatha Christie’s seminal murder mystery novel And Then There Were None as a modern crime-thriller about a DEA special forces team that attempts to rip off a cartel, only to find their stolen loot missing and big target on their backs.
(Or, to be more accurate, it originated as Ten Little Niggers, the 1939 Agatha Christie whodunit whose title was quickly changed to And Then There Were None.)
The plot lifts from Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None," but neglects the mystery.
Once it gets into And Then There Were None territory, the movie stalls.
Identity seems at first to be a cross between Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None and Alfred Hitchcock 's Psycho but then twists into something even more surprising.
The whole premise of 10 people stranded in an isolated location during a thunderstorm is a classic horror setup (think The Cat and the Canary or The Old Dark House), and having them killed off one by one by a mysterious killer is both classic horror and classic Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None).
Written by Michael Cooney (Jack Frost) and directed by James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, Kate & Leopold) the film is tightly and cleverly constructed -- both in the way that it follows the And Then There Were None motif and in the way it does not drop the ball in the final minutes, as many horror films do (even last year's above-average Below suffered from a poor ending).
And a lot happens in "Identity": This is a movie in the mold of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None," except that the killings, once they start, seem to trigger an avalanche of death.
Much like Agatha Christie's classic murder mystery And Then There Were None , a book made into a movie five times, the latter four with the title Ten Little Indians , Identity slowly kills off its characters and reserves the identity of the killer until the cruel end.
The characters realize they have something in common, Agatha Christie And Then There Were None style, sure, but there is a reason why the story of a group of strangers stranded into their doom is so timeless and classic, all the way back to the Queen of Mystery herself.
Rather than delve into the ripe existential phobias that are growing around its cast like coconuts, Old is content with mostly coasting on being a Fantasy Island episode that adapts And Then There Were None —complete with a surprise killer running around.
The best-known examples of the form – almost all of them Agatha Christie adaptations, such as And Then There Were None (1945), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and Death on the Nile (1978) – tend to be clever, star-studded little tchotchkes, eliciting a fleeting sensation of gratification but no lasting artistic impression.
The point, on the surface, is that Rian Johnson has given us a delicious mystery that riffs on Clue, Deathtrap, Columbo, Murder She Wrote , and even a little And Then There Were None .
“And Then There Were None,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Murder by Death” and “Clue” all fit this mold, but while that tradition carried over to television with Jessica Fletcher, Columbo and Monk solving cases on a weekly basis, the genre has been sorely missing from movie theaters for many years.
Most likely René Clair’s “And Then There Were None,” adapted from Agatha Christie’s quintessential “Ten Little Indians.”
Kenneth Branagh and John Malkovich both rebooted Hercule Poirot in various vehicles, and the BBC produced two critically-acclaimed TV movies with And Then There Were None and The Witness for the Prosecution .
And “Knives Out” joins a prestigious canon of movie mysteries, alongside René Clair’s 1945 Christie adaptation “And Then There Were None” and excellent early Hitchcock 1938’s “The Lady Vanishes.”
The screenplay by Bragi Schut and Maria Melnik is clearly indebted to Christie’s classic “And Then There Were None,” but the more probable inspiration is “Saw,” though with far less gore.
Obviously inspired by the “Final Destination” franchise (as well as “The Ring” pictures, and, further back, Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None”), it’s produced by the Blumhouse factory, which is actually trying to create a brand by promoting it as “Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare.”
Like Devil, which was essentially a modern riff on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the core of The Visit is rooted in a well-worn cultural narrative, in this case the old Grand Guignol tale of the visitor to the insane asylum who gradually comes to realize that the patients have taken over the asylum and are posing as doctors and nurses (there are, of course, bits and pieces of other familiar narratives in there, as well, particularly fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” although here Grandma and the Wolf and the Old Witch are all one in the same).
Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
Directed by Halina Reijn
influenced by And Then There Were None (1945)
Plot
But Bodies can be more precisely classified alongside such “awful rich people dying in a mansion” comedies as Ready or Not or You’re Next (all of which share a common ancestor in Agatha Christie’s blackly comic And Then There Were None).
For years, the whole youth-slasher-movie paradigm — first this kid gets killed off, then that kid, then this kid — has been traced back to the murder-mystery form invented by Agatha Christie in “And Then There Were None.” “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” with its restless camera movement and improv-style acting and general overdramatic rambunctiousness, is like “And Then There Were None” staged by John Cassavetes for the age of Instagram.
For years, the entire paradigm of teen horror movies has been traced back to the murder mystery form invented by Agatha Christie in "And Then There Were None." ". "Bodies Bodies Bodies," with its restless camera movement and impromptu-style acting and overall dramatic buzz, is like "And Then There Were None" staged by John Cassavetes for the age of Instagram.
They all pretty much exploit the basic idea of a monster on the loose in confined quarters, and they’re all spins on Agatha Christie’s classic mystery And Then There Were None.
As it grows in size, it becomes increasingly voracious, and the plot morphs into a science-fiction version of “And Then There Were None.”
It’s not giving anything away to say that from this point on, Life is basically a zero-gravity bodycount flick — And Then There Were None in space.
For as much as it gussies up its primal scenario with lots of NASA verisimilitude and techno babble, Life doesn’t have much more on its lizard brain than another deep-space round of And Then There Were None.
The movie has echoes of Carne and Prevert’s dada comedy “Bizarre, Bizarre,” and the delights of Rene Clair, like the musical “Le Million.”
"Amelie" wafts us back to the fairytale France that once seduced international moviegoers in the days of "Le Million," "The Red Balloon" "Mon Oncle," but it also shows all the things -- some sexual, some political -- that now grace the screen since those more innocent days.
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (2021)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by À Nous la Liberté (1931)
Visuals
It’s a lengthy tribute to the likes of Cocteau and Rene Clair, of which the latter’s A Nous la Liberte is a major influence and should be sought out by all after viewing.
Be it Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None , Christie knew how to turn each of her players into a standout.
“Game horror” originated in 1939 with Agatha Christie’s mystery novel, And Then There Were None (made into a very good film, directed by René Clair, in 1945), in which ten people are invited to an island and are, one by one, accused by their absent host of the crime of murder.
Thus, the film becomes an Agatha Christie "And Then There Were None" or "Ten Little Indians" kind of story, with the monster killing off each of the humans one by one and duplicating them in turn.
Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
influenced by And Then There Were None (1945)
Plot
Agatha Christie’s novels have been a particular pastime of mine since the day I read the brilliant And Then There Were None , a story that inspired and continues to inspire many famous modern mystery films.
Heck, the board game “Clue” is essentially this story combined with Christie’s 1939 murderous whodunit And Then There Were None, all of it broken down into intuitive investigative basics fit for the whole family to gleefully enjoy.
For comparison's sake, in the 44 years between 1945 and 1989, there were four different features made, under different titles, out of Christie's 1939 book And Then There Were None.
Christie definitivamente sabe cómo armar un cautivante rompecabezas criminal ( And Then There Were None continúa siendo mi favorito), pero a veces se excedía con lo rebuscados que son.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
Directed by Rian Johnson
influenced by And Then There Were None (1945)
Themes
Like Knives Out , this sequel pays homage to classic whodunnits (the many versions of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None come to mind, as does Evil Under the Sun ), but much fun comes thanks to its many surprises—I will not be the one to spoil them.
Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
Directed by Billy Wilder
influenced by And Then There Were None (1945)
In fact, my first exposure to it came when it was paired Rene Clair’s And Then There Were None (1945) on an Agatha Christie double-bill at Florida State University.
Putting aside my own fuzzy feelings for this property (I appeared in two separate high school productions during the 1980s, portraying the playboy in 10th grade and the detective in 12th grade), this isn't the best screen Christie — that honor belongs to 1957's Witness for the Prosecution — but it easily snags second place.
Envuelta en un lustroso atuendo que evoca, desde luego, las películas musicales de Jacques Demy (Los paraguas de Cherburgo, 1964), Vincent Minelli (An American in Paris, 1951) o Stanley Donen (Funny Face, 1965), la película de Chazelle oscila entre la alegre vivacidad y la profunda melancolía, apoyada por el score y canciones de Justin Herwitz, pero su esencia esta más vinculada al espíritu de los musicales de Rene Clair (Le Million, 1931) o el pretendido naturalismo espontáneo del Woody Allen de Todos dicen que te amo (1996), películas en las que una noción de “sinceridad” predomina sobre el rigor técnico de la pirotecnia.
Ready or Not (2019)
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin
influenced by And Then There Were None (1945)
Plot
This lurid, comical blend of "Rosemary's Baby," "The Most Dangerous Game" and Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None" begins with a flashback that reveals a bit too much of what bride-to-be Grace (Samara Weaving) is about to experience.