Ten Little Indians ** (1989, Donald Pleasence, Frank Stallone, Sarah Maur Thorp, Brenda Vaccaro, Herbert Lom, Moira Lister, Neil McCarthy) – Classic Movie Review 3262

Director Alan Birkinshaw’s just acceptable British 1989 thriller is the fourth of the four movie versions of Agatha Christie’s famous whodunit detective novel about 10 people invited by a mysterious stranger to an isolated location only to start being bumped off one after another according to the poem of Ten Little Indians. It stars Donald Pleasence, Frank Stallone, Sarah Maur Thorp, Brenda Vaccaro, Moira Lister, Neil McCarthy and Herbert Lom.

Unbelievably, it is producer Harry Alan Towers’s third filming of the Agatha Christie whodunit after his 1965 and 1974 adaptations, and this time it is written by Towers himself, with Jackson Hunsicker and Gerry O’Hara. But this time the performances of the cast and the handling aren’t really quite good enough to make the plot seem fresh again.

It is re-located for Towers’s third different background spot to a remote camp for a safari in Africa in the 1930s. They believe they have won a trip to go on safari, but an unknown murderer is soon at work . Just where would he set his fourth version?

Also in the cast are Warren Berlinger, Paul L Smith and Yehuda Efroni.

The opening credits say this film is based on Christie’s stage adaptation as the action-packed climax is taken almost verbatim from the stage script. This version introduces a lesbian affair. Herbert Lom, who plays General Romensky here, starred in the 1974 version as Dr Armstrong. Towers commissioned a script that used the novel’s ending and setting of an island but he changed these at the last minute. There is also 1987 Russian version called Desyat Negrityat.

Donald Pleasence is best remembered as Dr Sam Loomis in the Halloween series, the villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the Bond film You Only Live Twice, RAF Flight Lieutenant Colin Blythe in The Great Escape, and for Polanski’s Cul-de-sac.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3262

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