Peter Collinson (1974)
You keep longing for the promise of the title to be fulfilled. It seems for most of the (was it really only?) ninety-odd minutes running time that it never will be. Although you might think this adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1939 crime mystery is a hasty attempt to hitch a lift on the Orient Express[1], the print I saw was so blurred and wobbly that And Then There Were None looked much older than Sidney Lumet’s money-spinner. The ‘ten little Indians’[2] (who are, of course, eliminated one by one) include several of my least favourite performers (Gert Froebe, Elke Sommer, Oliver Reed). To add insult to injury, the best people (Stéphane Audran, Herbert Lom) are killed off relatively quickly. The first victim, however, is Charles Aznavour: this is a suitable punishment for his character’s giving a rendition of ‘Dance in the Old-Fashioned Way’ – for no better reason than that he’s played by Charles Aznavour. The cast also includes Richard Attenborough and Adolfo Celi.
[1970s]
[1] Afternote: This accusation was unfair. I see from IMDB that And Then There Were None was actually released just before Murder on the Orient Express in parts of continental Europe – and only a few months after the Lumet film in the USA and the UK.
[2] Afternote: The novel’s title on its original publication was Ten Little Niggers. It’s interesting and shocking to scroll down the IMDB list of titles under which Peter Collinson’s film was released internationally more than thirty years later. The titles include Ten Little Indians in the US, Dix petits nègres in France and the latter’s equivalent in, among several other countries, Spain and Sweden. It was Ein Unbekannter rechnet ab (literally, ‘an unknown person calculates’) in West Germany and Les assassins meurent aussi in French-speaking Canada. And Then There Were None or its equivalent was used in, for example, Australia and Italy, as well as the UK.
