27 works across 28 centuries, back to Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, Daniel) and Iliad.
Following one thread, 4 works from No Country for Old Men to Everyman. Back to all 27 works
2007
Film by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Contemporary American cinema. United States. In English.
The Coen brothers' 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel follows a welder who takes drug money from a massacre site in 1980 West Texas, the killer Anton Chigurh who hunts him, and an aging sheriff who cannot stop either. It follows the novel's plot and dialogue closely and stages it with the spare, suspense-driven style the Coens developed in their earlier crime films.
2005
Cormac McCarthy
Contemporary American. United States. Written in English.
McCarthy's crime novel set in 1980 West Texas, alternating the chase between Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh with first-person monologues by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.
Direct source, well documented.
The film adapts McCarthy's novel closely, keeping its plot, its title, much of its dialogue (including Chigurh's coin-toss scene at the gas station) and Bell's closing account of his dreams. The Coens cut most of Bell's interior monologues and Moss's encounter with the teenage hitchhiker but preserve the novel's decision to have Moss die offscreen.
1957
Film by Ingmar Bergman
Postwar European art cinema. Sweden. In Swedish.
A knight returning from the Crusades plays chess with Death for his life as plague spreads through medieval Sweden.
Disputed link, conjectural.
Reviewers have compared Chigurh's coin tosses, in which victims call heads or tails for their lives, to the Knight's chess game with Death in Bergman's film. McCarthy has not acknowledged the film, so the link rests on the shared figure of Death offering a game of chance.
c. 1495
Anonymous
Late medieval. England. Written in Middle English.
Morality play in which Death summons Everyman to account, and all his companions but Good Deeds abandon him.
Thematic kinship, probable.
The film's personified Death, who summons each character to account and leads them away in a final dance, belongs to the medieval morality tradition of Everyman. Bergman drew on late medieval church paintings that share that tradition.
The line stops here: probably translated from the Dutch play Elckerlijc; minor branch here.
