And Then There Were None ***** (1945, Walter Huston, Barry Fitzgerald, Louis Hayward, Roland Young, Richard Haydn, Judith Anderson, June Duprez, C Aubrey Smith) – Classic Movie Review 3,264

French film director René Clair turns Agatha Christie’s classic mystery novel and play into the richly stylish 1945 American black comedy mystery thriller film And Then There Were None. It is a great piece of vintage popular entertainment. 

French film director René Clair turns Agatha Christie’s classic mystery novel and play (sometimes known as Ten Little Indians) into the richly stylish 1945 American black comedy thriller film And Then There Were None. It is a great piece of vintage popular entertainment. It was released in the UK as Ten Little Indians, the novel’s third UK title.

There is wonderfully engaging acting (especially from Walter Huston, Barry Fitzgerald, Louis Hayward, Roland Young, Richard Haydn and Judith Anderson) as well as a full measure of suspense right up to the end.

Scriptwriter Dudley Nichols has done an extremely fine job on the story about 10 people invited to a lonely island house-party by a mysterious unknown host and being bumped off one by one, It sounds good in Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s score and it looks good too thanks to Lucien Andriot’s striking black and white cinematography.

Mr and Mrs Owen invite eight strangers are invited to small, isolated island off the coast of Devon, England. The guests settle in at a mansion where they are looked after by two newly hired servants, Thomas Rogers (Richard Haydn) and Ethel Rogers (Queenie Leonard), but there is no sign of the hosts, who are unknown to everyone. The guests sit for dinner and notice the centre piece of ten figurines of Indians in a circle. Later butler Thomas Rogers puts on a gramophone record, accusing them all of murder.

The film changes certain characters’ names and adheres to the ending of the stage play rather than that of the novel, following the altered, more upbeat climax that Christie had rewritten for her 1943 theatre version of the 1939 book.

Louis Hayward, C Aubrey Smith, Barry Fitzgerald, Richard Haydn, Mischa Auer, and Walter Huston in And Then There Were None (1945).

Also in the cast are June Duprez, C Aubrey Smith, Queenie Leonard, Mischa Auer and Harry Thurston.

There are three remakes so far, Ten Little Indians (1965), And Then There Were None aka Ten Little Indians (1974) and Ten Little Indians (1989), all of them by producer Harry Alan Towers and all with variations to its characters and locale, though there is also a videotaped made-for-TV version broadcast in 1959 and a 1987 Russian version called Desyat Negrityat (1987). Only the Russian film and a 2015 BBC One version keep to the novel’s ending.

The film won the Golden Leopard and the Best Direction Award at the Locarno International Film Festival.

The copyright was allowed to lapse and the film is in the public domain, despite being distributed by 20th Century Fox.

The cast are Barry Fitzgerald as Judge Francis J Quinncannon, Walter Huston as Dr Edward G Armstrong, Louis Hayward as Philip Lombard/ Charles Morley, Roland Young as Detective William Henry Blore, June Duprez as Vera Claythorne, Mischa Auer as Prince Nikita ‘Nikki’ Starloff, C Aubrey Smith as General Sir John Mandrake, Judith Anderson as Emily Brent, Richard Haydn as Thomas Rogers, Queenie Leonard as Ethel Rogers, and Harry Thurston as Fred Narracott.

French film-maker René Clair (11 November 1898 – 15 March 1981), born René-Lucien Chomette, went abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade before returning to France after World War Two.

And Then There Were None is Christie’s best-selling novel, with more than 100 million sales, making it the world’s best-selling mystery ever and one of the best-selling books of all time. It is the sixth best-selling title of any kind in any language, including reference works.

It was first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 6 November 1939 as Ten Little Niggers, after the children’s counting rhyme and minstrel song, a major plot element. Each of the ten victims – eight guests plus the island’s two caretakers – is killed in a way reflecting one of the lines of the rhyme. The US edition was released in January 1940 as And Then There Were None, the rhyme ‘s last five words. American reprints use that title, though Pocket Books paperbacks used Ten Little Indians between 1964 and 1986. UK editions used the original title till 1985.

The current published version of the rhyme starts: ‘Ten little Soldier Boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine.’ and ends ‘One little Soldier Boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.’

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3,264

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