The Last of Sheila (1973)
Directed by Herbert Ross
A year after Sheila is killed in a hit-and-run, her multimillionaire husband invites a group of friends to spend a week on his yacht playing a scavenger hunt-style mystery game—but the game turns out to be all too real and all too deadly.
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What critics compared The Last of Sheila to
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.
Drawing on the glitzy vibe of 1973’s “The Last of Sheila,” the writer-director gives us a set of characters who are walking showboats of acrid ambition.
If this all sounds familiar that’s because it is: director and writer Rian Johnson was inspired by director Herbert Ross’s 1973 movie The Last of Sheila .
That’s too bad because Johnson, clearly working with a larger budget, has made a lavish murder mystery that pays tribute to one of his often-cited influences, the 1970’s whodunnit, The Last of Sheila .
It’s as if the filmmaker has taken The Last of Sheila and combined it with Ten Little Indians and then put his own macabre “eat the rich” spin on it.
Once again collaborating with cinematographer Steve Yedlin, composer Nathan Johnson and editor Bob Ducsay, Johnson designs Glass Onion as a jaunty and electric The Last of Sheila-style venture in which diversions turn deadly serious.
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.
You could get happily lost trying to pin down “Knives Out’s” various antecedents, from “Murder, She Wrote,” which a character is shown watching early on, to “The Last of Sheila,” a 1973 whodunit directed by Herbert Ross and written by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim.
The movie is a shameless retread of the old formula that gave us the considerably wittier "And Then There Were None," "Ten Little Indians," and "The Last of Sheila," in which a group is brought together, only to be murdered one by one.
You may have seen this kind of thing before, in movies such as the old ’70s thriller “The Last of Sheila” and the Michael Douglas movie “ The Game ,” where something starts out a game and then turns serious, or maybe only seems to be serious.
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…the killer reveal proves relatively easy to spot coming (“The Last of Sheila,” this ain’t)…