Rian Johnson
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Sleuth (1972)
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
influenced Knives Out (2019)
Plot Characters Visuals Themes
Occasionally, a high-concept take on the whodunit will make a splash, as in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s adaptation of the cat-and-mouse two-hander Sleuth (1972), Sidney Lumet’s version of the mind-screwy meta-mystery Deathtrap (1982), or Johnathan Lynn’s manic screwball cult phenomenon Clue (1985).
He happens to be in the same business as the character played by Olivier in Sleuth, a successful crime novelist.
In a prominent place is a lifesize jolly-sailor dummy in homage to Sleuth, the play starring Lawrence Olivier and Michael Caine (and later, the film starring Caine and Jude Law).
Johnson’s found the perfect old house in Massachusetts to set his murder mystery; he’s stacked it with props that directly reference, and may even be, the props from Sleuth (1972), which was also one of my favourite twisty movies as a kid; he’s engaged a fun-loving ensemble of glitterati; and then there’s his subversions, spins and extrapolations, none of which I’ll reveal, save one: the poster may imply a true ensemble, but this film has a protagonist and a star, and that’s Ana De Armas (who you hopefully remember fondly from Blade Runner 2049 as Ryan Gosling’s AI girlfriend).
The biggest drawback of Johnson’s Knives Out is its over-fondness for and insistence on paying respect to Agatha Christie-type mysteries (with the oddly exotic Blanc-Craig a stand-in for Hercule Poirot), Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth and so forth.
The Michael Caine/Laurence Olivier “Sleuth” contains a joke about “a passing sheep rapist” that’s tonally and thematically similar to this movie’s reference to a character “joylessly masturbating to pictures of dead deer.”
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Directed by John Huston
influenced Brick (2006), Knives Out (2019)
Themes Characters Plot
Over the years, I have found that many of my other favorite examples of the genre—things like “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Big Sleep,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Chinatown” and “The Big Lebowski”—have tended to lean that way as well and that is why they have managed to stand the test of time.
The best mysteries ( Hound of the Baskervilles , Murder by Death , The Maltese Falcon ) have an effective con at play, a backdrop where only us and our leading character know an insidious game is afoot.
The largely accepted chronological definition of what �film noir� is is that it more or less began with The Maltese Falcon in 1941, and came to a triumphant end with Touch of Evil in 1958.
Yet by the end of the movie this awesome meathead has become a poignant figure, wounded by love and conscious that -- like Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon -- he's nothing but a pawn to his boss.
As the plot gets increasingly complex (though no more so than "The Maltese Falcon," to which this film gives many nods), "Brick" becomes less clever and more quirky; at times so overwrought that it becomes a little silly.
If the great mystery writer Dashiell Hammett ("The Maltese Falcon," "The Glass Key") had written about teenagers, it might have turned out to be quite a bit like "Brick," a moody puzzler written and directed by Hammett admirer Rian Johnson.
Clue (1985)
Directed by Jonathan Lynn
influenced Knives Out (2019), Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
Plot
Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is mystery writer whose immense success has subsidized the lives of his several children and grandchildren, all of whom have gathered at his ornate mansion which, as one notes, evokes the board game “Clue.”
Those words have paid for his mansion – “The guy practically lives in a Clue board,” notes Lakeith Stanfield’s police detective – and have bankrolled the activities of his three children, and their children.
In the same flavor as Clue, Murder on the Orient Express, and Deathtrap, you have a murder, a collection of characters, each of whom has a reason to have done it, and a sleuth investigation on the job.
Even better, he has an all-star cast eager to veritably feast on the scenery of his cinematic game of "Clue."
Cinematically located between Sleuth and Clue, it owes a great deal to both, though it's substantially less impressive than the former and noticeably better than the latter.
It’s like Johnson has mashed-up The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie with Ten Little Indians and added a dash of Clue for good measure, doing so with such likeably confident aplomb I can’t help but be impressed.
In the same flavor as Clue , Murder on the Orient Express , and Deathtrap , you have a murder, a collection of characters, each of whom has a reason to have done it, and a sleuth investigation on the job.
Writer-director Rian Johnson, still being nerd-roasted for his smash-hit Star Wars installment, The Last Jedi, happily acknowledges his influences in constructing Knives Out—primarily Agatha Christie novels and the movies made from them (Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun), as well as pictures like Gosford Park and the super-tricky Deathtrap.
Occasionally, a high-concept take on the whodunit will make a splash, as in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s adaptation of the cat-and-mouse two-hander Sleuth (1972), Sidney Lumet’s version of the mind-screwy meta-mystery Deathtrap (1982), or Johnathan Lynn’s manic screwball cult phenomenon Clue (1985).
Structurally, Johnson borrows from Sleuth and Deathtrap, two movies (both based on plays) that spring huge surprises every 30 minutes or so, defying the audience's presumptions.
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.
Writer-director Rian Johnson ’s smart, wickedly funny whodunit plays like a game of Clue come to life—it's a jumped-up Agatha Christie thriller, a throwback to fiendishly clever puzzlers like Sleuth and Deathtrap, and a scathing satire of the hypocrisy and racism of the Trump era.
For all its glossy sheen, however, Looper seems more intent on drawing on action flicks of yore; Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys and James Cameron’s The Terminator are clear sources of inspiration for Johnson as he interrogates time-travel based conundrums, most clearly via the older Joe, appearing to ask whether by attempting to change the future, how far would you go?
So in an eerie echo from the situation in the original “The Terminator” (1984) Joe is looking for any male child born in a certain hospital on a certain date.
It's essentially a low-tech variation on themes from "The Terminator" but ingenious enough to feel fresh, intriguing and even bewildering at times.
Johnson pays homage to The Terminator with a time-traveling antagonist coming to kill a child and the mother named Sara or Sarah (Connor).
There are echoes of Twelve Monkeys and especially The Terminator in Johnson’s story, and the movie’s final third gets a little bogged down in familiar sci-fi tropes.
With touches of The Terminator , the aforementioned Marker film and the inspired-by-it 12 Monkeys , a classic episode of The Twilight Zone and more, Looper is aware of its sci-fi legacy, but manages plenty of unique touches all its own.
Movies like Murder by Death and The Last of Sheila doubled as playgrounds for seasoned character actors to ham it up to their hearts' content.
Toying with the classic elements of films like Clue, Murder By Death, and the countless Agatha Christie adaptations, Johnson crafts a clever puzzle that is relevant and political.
Knives Out captures the murder mystery genre as well as the more comedic films peppered throughout the genre, such as Clue and Murder by Death .
Yes, comparison to classics such as “Murder by Death” (1976) and “Clue” (1985) are apt.
The best mysteries ( Hound of the Baskervilles , Murder by Death , The Maltese Falcon ) have an effective con at play, a backdrop where only us and our leading character know an insidious game is afoot.
The Kid Detective (2020)
Directed by Evan Morgan
influenced by Brick (2006), Knives Out (2019)
Themes Plot Visuals
The Kid Detective reminded me of the best qualities in Rian Johnson’s whodunits, Brick and Knives Out; most notably the way Evan Morgan is able to establish his interestingly quaint characters, and carve out every nook-and-cranny of Willowbrook’s communities.
Splendidly summoning film noir-esque vibes, classically ghastly bad guys and femme fatale types out of a whimsical small town full of grotesque mysteries, this bold and often surprisingly humorous film — think of it as a more mainstream version of Rian Johnson’s “Brick” — grapples with themes related to murder and abuse, as well as the existential dread of its central recluse, who fell grossly short of the promising life he thought he was meant to have in his younger days.
Sure, the movie has its clear inspirations—Rian Johnson’s Brick springs immediately to mind, as does the similarly themed Mystery Team —but Morgan and Brody contour their work into something original.
The notion of a high-school detective (even a grown-up one) will remind many of Brick , writer/director Rian Johnson’s brilliant debut feature from 2005, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young gumshoe.
The Kid Detective reminded me of the best qualities in Rian Johnson’s whodunits, Brick and Knives Out; most notably the way Evan Morgan is able to establish his interestingly quaint characters, and carve out every nook-and-cranny of Willowbrook’s communities.
Think a more realistic version of the deadpan humor of Wes Anderson mixed with the sleek neo-noir of Rian Johnson’s Brick and you might be somewhere in the ballpark.
Stephen Holden, writing in the New York Times, panned the movie as a "flashy cinematic stunt" and compared it unfavorably to Alan Parker's 1976 kiddie-gangster musical Bugsy Malone.
Alan Parker's " Bugsy Malone " (1976) was a 1930s gangster movie cast with pre-teen kids (including Jodie Foster ).
One of the obvious antecedents for this film is Alan Parker's regrettable "Bugsy Malone," where children (and a 13-year-old Jodie Foster) played cops and robbers.
As a premise, it sounds cutesy-horrible, like an overlong episode of Jim Henson's Hammett Babies (or worse, a vaguely ped curio along the lines of 1976's Bugsy Malone), but the conviction and earnest wit involved carries it well past the conceptual experiment stage into a genuinely effective reinterpretation of classic noir.
The Last of Sheila (1973)
Directed by Herbert Ross
influenced Knives Out (2019), Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
Plot
Movies like Murder by Death and The Last of Sheila doubled as playgrounds for seasoned character actors to ham it up to their hearts' content.
The movie’s wit and energy hold your interest, but they don’t spark the pleasure of the unexpected, the thrill you felt in Laura, The Last of Sheila, Chinatown, The Sixth Sense, or the 1974 adaptation of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (not Kenneth Branagh’s inept remake), movies whose big reveals surprise you in their elegant simplicity.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Clue , Gosford Park , Murder by Death , all the Murder on the Orient Express es and The Last of Sheila , which I read about in a Rian Johnson tweet (and then actually watched; it’s a gem).
Prime examples include Herbert Ross’ cult classic The Last of Sheila (1973) and Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974).
That winking reference is one of many that range from the amusingly obvious — a quick glimpse of Angela Lansbury tapping away at a typewriter in a TV rerun of Murder, She Wrote , dubbed in Spanish — to craftier Easter eggs like having one major character sing a snippet of a song by Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated with Anthony Perkins on the script of another starry murder mystery, The Last of Sheila .
Also influential is Herbert Ross’s The Last of Sheila , in which James Coburn gathers the same guests who were at his house a year earlier when his wife died in a hit-and-run.
Chinatown (1974)
Directed by Roman Polanski
influenced Brick (2006), Knives Out (2019)
Plot Themes Characters Visuals
The movie’s wit and energy hold your interest, but they don’t spark the pleasure of the unexpected, the thrill you felt in Laura, The Last of Sheila, Chinatown, The Sixth Sense, or the 1974 adaptation of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (not Kenneth Branagh’s inept remake), movies whose big reveals surprise you in their elegant simplicity.
Over the years, I have found that many of my other favorite examples of the genre—things like “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Big Sleep,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Chinatown” and “The Big Lebowski”—have tended to lean that way as well and that is why they have managed to stand the test of time.
Johnson was lucky to land Gordon-Levitt for the role; a veteran of the sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun, he's proved a formidable dramatic actor in indies like Manic (2001) and Mysterious Skin (2004), and in Brick he holds the screen as powerfully as Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.
Still, the lousy sound and a creeping narrative murk prevent ''Brick" from fully becoming the ''Chinatown" of high school flicks, and the final scenes don't lift off from private-eye cliches so much as cave in to them.
Taking visual cues from Chinatown, gifted DP Steve Yedlin favors shots from below, and stark under-populated exteriors that convey menace even in California sunshine.
It's true that Roman Polanski's "Chinatown," a 1974 neo-noir, was bathed in L.A. sunlight; but that film had an inventively sinister plot, and a dark sexual kink.
Enter Beniot Blanc, a world-famous super-sleuth played by Daniel Craig with the same kind of lip-smacking relish and hambone Southern accent he deployed to such revelatory effect in 2017’s “Logan Lucky.”
Over the years, Daniel Craig has shown considerable range when not playing 007 and his performance as Blanc deserves a place alongside that of Logan Lucky’s Joe Bang.
Much as Steven Soderbergh did in his Southern-fried heist picture Logan Lucky (2017), Johnson embeds a zeitgeist-tapping urgency within Knives Out’s more simplistic, twisty pleasures.
Craig uses a Southern accent, with more molasses in it than the one he used in Logan Lucky.
The Cheshire-born Craig obviously relishes the chance to get well away from James Bond and put on a showier version of the Southern-friend accent he adopted in Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, and he’s very amusing, despite the character’s inherent preposterousness.
Yes, to call the performances by most of the cast hammy is to wildly understate the case—especially when it comes to Craig, whose latest take on a Southern accent (following “Logan Lucky”) would give even Foghorn Leghorm pause—but these are smart actors who know exactly what they are doing and who realize that there is a time and a place for quiet and deft underplaying and this particular film is not it.
Kagemusha (1980)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
influenced Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
Visuals Characters
Johnson embraces and extends George Lucas’ original Akira Kurosawa fetish, incorporating visual nods to Kagemusha and Ran while borrowing a bit of Rashomon for the most important backstory reveal.
The director takes Luke into territory just about no one saw coming, making him a lone samurai full of heartache and regret more akin to heroes in Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo or Kagemusha than he is the dashing young champion of something like The Hidden Fortress .
A climactic confrontation between the beleaguered Alliance and the First Order boasts a visual splendor that recalls “Kagemusha” and “Ran.”
Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
influenced Looper (2012), Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
Visuals Themes
Scenes in Snoke’s throne room with blood red walls, warriors in similarly colored uniforms and his gold brocade robe (designed by Michael Kaplan, Blade Runner) are indelible.
There are nods to science-fiction films like “Blade Runner” in the futuristic society, but the fact that it is only 30 years in the future makes for a more relatable urban landscape.
With both its urban and rural-cornfield milieus marked by consuming bleakness, Looper harkens back to both Blade Runner and The Killers while nonetheless crafting its own unique spin on noir fatalism.
Tropes from Blade Runner, Twelve Monkeys, and the odd French New Wave thriller are mixed and matched to give the illusion you’re watching an ?existential?
There hasn’t been a movie quite like it, even though it has scenes and themes that we’ve seen before in movies like “The Terminator,” “Blade Runner” and some of the “X-Men” films.
Like Philip K. Dick - who wrote the story that became "Blade Runner," aspects of which "Looper" resembles - Johnson uses genre to develop unconventional ideas and alternative possibilities.
Evil Under the Sun (1982)
Directed by Guy Hamilton
influenced Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), Knives Out (2019)
Plot Themes
Writer-director Rian Johnson, still being nerd-roasted for his smash-hit Star Wars installment, The Last Jedi , happily acknowledges his influences in constructing Knives Out —primarily Agatha Christie novels and the movies made from them ( Death on the Nile , Evil Under the Sun ), as well as pictures like Gosford Park and the super-tricky Deathtrap .
This past month, directors of four Netflix films were invited to curate some personal favorites; thanks to Rian Johnson’s mystery-minded picks, I ended up seeing a very nice 35mm print of Evil Under the Sun , a fairly ideal Agatha Christie adaptation that, unsurprisingly, is indeed a key reference point for Glass Onion , which borrows its first-act mechanics of bringing suspects to an island and running through all their motives, and its third act in ways that would be unfair to reveal; the second act successfully goes its own structural way.
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.
Evoking the feel of seaside murder mysteries like Evil Under The Sun (1982) and The Last of Sheila (1973) (this one particularly, given its similar absurdity), Glass Onion ramps up the broad caricatures, silly one-liners, and genuinely stupid (“stupid” is a term of endearment in my household) sight gags, all of which are wondrously funny, but, more than that, they rarely ever don’t have a callback to something important later.
The Big Sleep (1946)
Directed by Howard Hawks
influenced Brick (2006), Knives Out (2019)
Themes Visuals
Over the years, I have found that many of my other favorite examples of the genre—things like “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Big Sleep,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Chinatown” and “The Big Lebowski”—have tended to lean that way as well and that is why they have managed to stand the test of time.
Rian Johnson claims The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep as his main influences, but I also taste Blue Velvet and a dash of Napoleon Dynamite in the mix.
Brick may find its time and place in modernity but its soul is straight out of The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep.
The dialogue is obviously inspired by old-school crime novels, but the cinematic antecedents are much more Blue Velvet and Miller’s Crossing than The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.
Still, Johnson’s connect-the-dots noir script gives him the chance to experiment with atmospherics, which owe a debt as much to Blue Velvet as to The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon.
Although itâs not The Big Sleep, Brick is hardly a snooze.
Looper may not have the bell-ringing resonance of Chris Marker's La Jetée , one of its touchstones, but it's a jaunty match-up of genre and character drama that's far smarter and more finely wrought than almost anything else in the multiplexes.
Slamming genre cheap thrills together with high-art aspirations, Mr. Johnson spins a fast-moving entertainment out of a setup that could have been cooked up by the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick and was undoubtedly influenced by Chris Marker’s cinematic touchstone from 1962, “ La Jetée ,” in which scientists in a postapocalyptic world send, as the film puts it, “emissaries into time to call past and future to the rescue of the present.”
If I reveal that he is also named Joe, you can probably guess where this is going, especially if you can recall the central conceit of Chris Marker’s 1962 masterpiece La Jetee and its 1995 Terry Gilliam remake-remodel, Twelve Monkeys (which, of course, starred Willis): that of a young person encountering a time-travelling older version of himself.
Comparisons will be made to Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Terry Gilliam’s inspired derivative, 12 Monkeys, in which Bruce Willis also starred.
The 1995 movie, based on Chris Marker's La Jetee, was the complete entertainment package: humane, tragic, exciting, surprising and comical.
But Johnson doesn't settle for the philosophical; he revels in cinema allusions: in addition to 12 Monkeys and La Jetée, there's The Terminator (the main female character's name, played by a plucky Emily Blunt, is Sara), Memento, Angel Heart. . . .
Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
influenced Knives Out (2019)
Plot Characters
It’s a kind of self-reflexive knowingness that never crosses the line into snark, but enables Johnson and his cast to fool around with their premise and make “Knives Out” feel like something a good deal fresher than say, Kenneth Branagh’s recent waxwork remake of “Murder on the Orient Express.”
Marta’s inability to fib is balanced against Benoit’s tendency toward wild, grandiloquent speculation, which Craig plays with just the right level of hearty, self-satisfied cheerfulness—he’s a better Hercule Poirot than Kenneth Branagh was in Murder on the Orient Express .
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 movie’s wit and energy hold your interest, but they don’t spark the pleasure of the unexpected, the thrill you felt in Laura, The Last of Sheila, Chinatown, The Sixth Sense, or the 1974 adaptation of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (not Kenneth Branagh’s inept remake ), movies whose big reveals surprise you in their elegant simplicity.
Prime examples include Herbert Ross’ cult classic The Last of Sheila (1973) and Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974).
Johnson embraces and extends George Lucas’ original Akira Kurosawa fetish, incorporating visual nods to Kagemusha and Ran while borrowing a bit of Rashomon for the most important backstory reveal.
A climactic confrontation between the beleaguered Alliance and the First Order boasts a visual splendor that recalls “Kagemusha” and “Ran.”
Writer-director Rian Johnson approaches the franchise with a bold new vision, influenced by everything from Ran to Spaceballs.
Johnson embraces and extends George Lucas’ original Akira Kurosawa fetish, incorporating visual nods to Kagemusha and Ran while borrowing a bit of Rashomon for the most important backstory reveal.
One scene is replayed three times with different interpretations but it’s hardly Rashomon and a movie this long can’t afford to dawdle.
Luke's selfish reasons for tutoring Rey, along with multiple Rashomon-like flashbacks revealing the betrayal of his former apprentice, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), reflect a modern-day cynicism that fans of the original Star Wars trilogy might find jarring (but not Jar Jarring, fortunately).
And her unexpected connection with Kylo (they’re on a first name basis now) complicates matters, as does the Rashomon like retelling of what really went down at Luke’s doomed Jedi academy.
It leads to a series of flashbacks that might have come across as contrived in lesser hands, but Johnson conceives these past skeletons as a “Rashomon”-like puzzle.
This is explained to Rey by both Skywalker and Ren, with Johnson cleverly using a “Rashomon”-like storytelling style to do it.
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Directed by Irvin Kershner
influenced Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), Knives Out (2019)
Plot Themes Visuals
While The Last Jedi isn’t a mirror image of The Empire Strikes Back in the same way that The Force Awakens was to A New Hope, there are intentional parallels between the sophomoric chapters in these respective trilogies.
For all its parallels to The Empire Strikes Back in structure, themes, and existential crises, The Last Jedi is the funniest of all the Star Wars films (not including the unintentionally funny Star Wars Holiday Special ).
While there are elements nodding to “The Empire Strikes Back” — the second and best of the original three — “The Last Jedi” is no copycat.
Yes, The Last Jedi does reference Empire Strikes Back to a certain extent but not as slavishly as The Force Awaken s mirrored A New Hope .
There’s a reprise of the Empire Strikes Back cave scene (this time rendered as a hall of mirrors) and a hint that Rey is in thrall to the Dark Side, a twist that is unoriginal and half-hearted, comes out of nowhere, and feels completely wrong for a character who radiates goodness.
In the way that The Force Awakens echoed A New Hope , there are definitely some (although far, far fewer) parallels between The Last Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back , but Johnson has a much lighter touch than JJ Abrams.