The Thin Blue Line (1988)
I brought up Errol Morris’s documentary masterpiece last month as a special mention in my Movies to Watch After list for Happy Death Day. Now it’s more appropriate to recommend it fully as it’s the greatest true crime film of all time. I actually consider The Thin Blue Lie to be the best documentary of all time, period, but it’s certainly the peak of nonfiction murder mystery movies.
Classifiable as a documentary noir, the film takes the form of a hardboiled detective story where Morris is the real-life Poirot. The onscreen interviews with witnesses, lawyers, a wrongfully convicted man, and others associated with a case of a slain policeman function like a detective interviewing people during an investigation. With each of the interviews, though, we get to see the crime play out anew with changed details to fit that person’s perspective and memory.
It’s not a spoiler to address the outcome of the documentary, which wound up freeing the innocent man who’d been convicted for the crime. There are other great murder mystery docs, including Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, The Imposter, Murder on a Sunday Morning, and Amanda Knox (the one actually recommended after Happy Death Day) and other docs involving exoneration, but none solve the crime the way Morris does with this film.
Crime of the Century (1996)
If the plot of Murder on the Orient Express seems familiar, that’s probably because it was inspired by the true story of the Lindbergh baby. In 1932, two years before Christie published her novel, the 20-month-old son of iconic aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped. The requested ransom was paid, but the child was tragically found dead anyway. Of course, the killer didn’t disappear only to be collectively murdered by a train’s worth of people connected to the Lindbergh family.
Surprisingly there hasn’t been a major motion picture about the real Lindbergh kidnapping. We’ve got the Billy Wilder-helmed Lindbergh biopic The Spirit of St. Louis, but that’s strictly about the aviator’s famous transatlantic flight. For dramatic depictions of the kidnapping, there are just two acclaimed TV movies focused on the events, NBC’s 1976 production The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, which would have at the time resonated with fans of the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express adaptation, and this HBO feature broadcast 20 years later.
Crime of the Century focuses more on the aftermath of the kidnapping, with the arrest, conviction, and execution of Bruno Hauptmann (played by Stephen Rea), all of which happened after the publication of “Murder on the Orient Express.” But Christie’s story is also about the justice sought for the similar crime. Besides his parallel to the Orient Express murder victim, the fact that Hauptmann claimed innocence to the end echoes what happened to the nursemaid referenced in Murder on the Orient Express who was put on trial for the child’s death and then killed herself.
Hot Fuzz (2007)
If you haven’t already seen this comedy from Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, their follow-up to Shaun of the Dead and second installment in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, I hate to explain its relevance to Murder on the Orient Express. But it’s not the sort of movie that’s really ruined by knowing how it ends. Basically, it’s another example of the use of the “everybody did it” trope, albeit not to the same extent as with the characters in Christie’s story.
Partly a sendup of action movies and also rural British mystery horror films such as The Wicker Man, the plot of Hot Fuzz involves a very serious and overachieving cop from the city (Pegg) who is relocated to the idyllic countryside, where normally nothing much happens but coincidentally many townspeople are suddenly being murdered. He has to team up with a buffoonish partner (Three Flavours Cornetto staple Nick Park) to find out whodunem. Agatha co-star Dalton is in this, too (and in last week’s pick of Flash Gordon), as the main suspect.
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Had I been able to do a Movies to Watch After list for The Hateful Eight when it came out, at least one Christie adaptation would have been included. While the type of film most adhered to is clearly the Western, Quentin Tarantino’s most recent three-hour blood fest is also a masterpiece of the mystery genre. Apparently Samuel L. Jackson even referred to his bounty hunter character as “Hercule Negro” during production. And the filmmaker has acknowledged Christie’s influence in interviews.
Given its isolated snowy location and multiple mysterious murders, The Hateful Eight might seem most related to the 1965 version of And Then There Were None, aka Ten Little Indians. Of course, Murder on the Orient Express is also set amidst a snowy landscape, with the weather keeping all the players in one place, and The Hateful Eight is again another movie that involves an ensemble of characters with seemingly coincidental connections revealed as the plot goes on. Video essays can point to the link to John Carpenter’s The Thing all they want, but The Thing is pretty much a Christie-inspired sci-fi horror movie itself.
Related Topics: Movie DNA, Murder on the Orient Express
