[Film Review] And Then There Were None (1945) 6.7/10

French filmmaker René Clair’s last Hollywood fare during his American exile period (1941-1946, four features made for four different studios), this adaptation of Agatha Christie’s well-known murder mystery TEN LITTLE INDIANS, seizes on the novel’s intriguing premise, corrals a posse of 10 sinners on a secluded British island, where divine justice awaits for them.

Clair intentionally defuses the story’s somber atmosphere with his jocose wordless opening sequences introducing the eight strangers from one to another, as their lives are concatenated on the same boat (both figuratively and literally), they are all invited by Mr. and Mrs. U.N. Owens to the island for the weekend, curiously, none of them actually meet the hosts before, including the two servants Thomas and Ethel Rogers (Haydn and Leonard), who are hired to tend to the guests.

Of course, the hosts fail to materialize at the dinner time, after a dutiful Thomas plays a vinyl record (at the behest of the host through a letter), a solemn voice denounces each of them for their respective past murderous crimes, just like what happens in the famous nursery, these “ten little Indians” will sequentially and mysteriously dispatched by an unknown perpetrator until “and then there were none”, but this is a cheat, simply because that doesn’t actually happen as the studio senses that during the ongoing war at then, it would be too bleak an ending for escapism-seeking audience, so spoilers alert, the movie should have been more appositely retitled as “AND THEN THERE WERE TWO”, and the script sensibly lets the lucky pair getting away with the accusation (one assumes a false identity, another seems to be cover the crime for a closer one).

Clair’s workmanlike classic style rounds off the ups-and-downs of a narrative saturated with (predictable) death that wholly hinges on the acting chops, Judith Anderson is as haughty as per usual, not turning a hair even when the Grim Reaper lurking around, and a mannered Richard Haydn deliciously chops the scenery before his time is running out, quips “everyone must eat a speck of dirt before he dies!”. A bonhomous Barry Fitzgerald playing off an equally proactive Walter Huston holds court, whereas the mis-pair of a mansplaining Louis Hayward and a demure June Duprez leaves a less palatable taste as the former seems to be overtly credulous in believing the latter’s innocence, especially when it doesn’t chime in with the culprit’s final remark “next trust a woman!”, a pat venom left by a hardened bachelor in a formulaic celluloid adaptation of a classic whodunit.

referential entries: Clair’s LE MILLION (1931, 7.4/10), I MARRIED A WITCH (1942, 5.8/10).