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Rating:
And Then There Were None, the book, certainly needs no introduction. Organized according to a narrative structure of refined cruelty, where the relentless progression of murders is punctuated by the lines of an now proverbial nursery rhyme ("Ten little niggers went out to dine..."), Agatha Christie's most harrowing mystery is also her most famous and most imitated novel.
Of the many film versions (three official ones, plus various "indirect" tributes, like the recent Identity by James Mangold), the most noteworthy is the first, made in Hollywood in 1945 by none other than one of the noble fathers of French cinema, René Clair, the author of Entr'acte (1924), An Italian Straw Hat (1927), The Million (1931), Liberty for Us (1931) and other memorable films shot at home before his (forced) exile in England and the USA.
Clair's adaptation is a high-class divertissement, shot with the impeccable smoothness of old Hollywood productions and enriched with all the quirks one would expect from a master of cinema. The screenplay by the excellent Dudley Nichols rather faithfully follows the original plot, but it makes a sensational variation of the ending, inspired by the stage play written by Christie herself: whereas in the novel all ten characters die and the identity of the mysterious killer is revealed by a letter delivered to the police - a solution that, for obvious reasons, could not be adopted in cinema or theater - in the film the characters of Philip Lombard and Vera Claythorne survive and confront the murderer, who has the chance to confess before dying.
Though inserted somewhat forcibly, the "happy ending" aligns with the overall tone of the film, more inclined to the crime comedy than to the thriller, rich in irony and black humor, deliberately distant from the grim atmospheres and moral ambiguity of the book (where all the characters have a sordid past to hide and, consistently with Christie's puritanical justice, pay with their lives). It is remarkable how many episodes of the novel, originally not reassuring at all, have been transposed literally but in a turned and humorous key: the repeated accusations against butler Rogers, Dr. Armstrong's episodes of alcoholism and, above all, the amusing beginning, completely silent, with the ten characters sitting in the boat headed to the island, scrutinizing each other, seized by distrust and seasickness.
To René Clair's inventive direction goes the unquestionable merit of not having limited himself to a mere illustration of the original subject but having chosen creative solutions, not banal, genuinely cinematic (see the scene where four characters spy on each other, with the camera retreating and... passing through the keyhole). Equally brilliant was the idea of turning the nursery rhyme of the ten little niggers into a catchy tune, played or whistled every time a murder is committed.
The excellent performance of the actors - all relatively unknown character actors, among whom the only star is the great Walter Huston in the role of Dr. Armstrong - contributes to the good final result and makes this film a small classic of the genre: which obviously loses much of its effectiveness if you have read the book and already know who the killer is.
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