Film review: And Then There Were None (1945)

I'll leave it up to you to google the original title of the film and the name it was broadcast under on British TV right up into the 70s.  Even the film in the forties resorted to its somewhat less offensive version, which is thoroughly incorporated into the film in the form of a macabre song that gets referenced throughout.

This film has a rather unexpected director: Rene Clair of A Nous La Liberte and I Married A Witch (and also, I now see, The Ghost Goes West), better known for light comedies, but while this film has definite light touches (and a rather European blase-ness about death), 

it doesn't skimp on the suspense or even horrific elements.  The plot itself has become something of a cliche: 10 people (eight guests and two servants) staying at a large house on a tiny island, each of them called there supposedly by a friend of theirs with news of a job offer from a mutual friend "U.N. Owen" (a transparent alias), who is surprisingly absent when they all arrive, 

until his disembodied voice is heard on a gramaphone record played by the butler at 9 PM, that lists the unpunished deaths for which each one of them (including the butler and his wife) is responsible.  Of course now everyone wants to leave, but there are no communications with the mainland and the boat will not return until after the weekend.  And then, of course, the deaths begin, starting with the obnoxious playboy Russian "professional guest" who after revealing that, yes indeed, he did run over a couple of people while drunk, his only regret that it cost him his license, keels over after drinking a poisoned drink.  Very quickly it emerges both that the deaths mirror the deaths of the "ten little Indians" of the song he was loudly singing before expiring, but that every time a death happens, one of the ten little figurines in the centerpiece on the dining table vanishes.  (Why they don't just remove all of them at once or put a better guard on them to see who keeps doing this is one of the many annoyances of Christie's plot.)

As I say, it's all archly done but with definite frissons, and several characters are sympathetic so that you're not rooting for them all to die, including Walter Huston's drunken doctor, Barry Fitzgerald's perky little Irish judge, Roland Young's cockney Detective Blore, and sultry June "Thief of Baghdad" Duprez just because she's sultry.  

You certainly root against the callous god botherer Emily Brent who has no regrets about her own nephew hanging himself, and it is no real spoiler to reveal that she will get hers.  Enough twists and turns happen that it doesn't get repetitive, and we are kept guessing as to whether one of the 10 is the real "U.N. Owen" or if he's hiding out somewhere on the premises.  And are all of the guests as bad as they're painted, and should we really be rooting for them all to die?  Definitely one of the better Agatha Christie adaptations I've seen.