Best Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians Adaptation?

Either your personal favorite or the best made movie.

I think And Then There Were None (2015) is both the best made and the closest adaptation of Christie's novel. Unknown Maeve Dermody holds her own with an-all star consisting of Aidan Turner, Charles Dance, Toby Stephens, Burn Gorman, Miranda Richardson, Noah Taylor, and legendary Sam Neill.

The most nostalgic one for me is Ten Little Indians (1965). I couldn't believe there was sex in it! However, they got a lot of it just wrong. Ten Little Indian suffers from having terrible actors (Fabian, Daliah Lavi, Shirley Eaton) play alongside a few of the greatest British character actors of all time (Wilfred Hyde-White, Dennis Price, Leon Genn, Stanley Holloway). The old-school actors are taking it easy and the newcomers are trying their hardest, which makes the film uneven. Hugh O'Brian was hot as hell in this, too.

And Then There Were None (1945) is great, but suffers from being a little boring. This was the best until the 2015 adaptation came around. It does have sweet, sensitive, bisexual Louis Hayward, good in everything Walter Houston, and Irish heavyweight Barry Fitzgerald.

1974's And Then There Were None was overshadowed by Sydney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express (arguably the best Christie-movie of all time).

1989's Ten Little Indians was god-awful. Was this a TV movie????

Deysat Negityat (1987) was just depressing, but great. Americans are stupid and fat now and do not like foreign films.

by Anonymousreply 12July 18, 2021 1:35 AM

ATTWN 2015 is the only good Sarah Phelps adaptation. The others she has adapted are ironic, plotted works, and while dark in some ways, they don’t suit her Scandi-Noir style, and she produced weirdly humourless abominations.

It is a shame Julian Fellowes got to The Crooked House before she did. Endless Night, Murder Is Easy and Five Little Pigs might work. Towards Zero is particularly perverse, especially the very end with the heroine.

by Anonymousreply 1June 14, 2021 3:25 PM

How about the Family guy episode - "And Then There Were Fewer"?

Offsite Link
by Anonymousreply 2June 14, 2021 3:27 PM

Why does everyone like Ten Little Indians (1965)?

by Anonymousreply 3June 14, 2021 5:21 PM

I've seen most of the adaptations, I believe, and I find them all tedious and depressing. The viewer is just waiting for the next murder and there is no positive payoff at the end--no Poirot solution, no Miss Marple revelation, just unrelieved gloom. Ten people dead? Yuck.

by Anonymousreply 4June 14, 2021 10:53 PM

R4 The book is excellent and has a lot of character background. Have you read it?

by Anonymousreply 5June 15, 2021 3:02 PM

What is the appeal to 1965's Ten Little Indians?

by Anonymousreply 6June 28, 2021 12:25 AM

I love the '45 film noir version with Judith Anderson. The 2015 film is good enough, but the '65-'89 adaptations are crap.

by Anonymousreply 7June 28, 2021 12:37 AM

The 2015 version is head and shoulders above the others, just for taking the novel seriously and having the original ending. The only quibble I have with it is that the point of those people being on the island was that they weren't just murderers who hadn't been caught, their cases involved a lot of shades of grey, which made it more interesting. How otherwise upstanding people could commit murder and even convince themselves they never did. Spoilers but

- the change in the backstories for the General, the servants, Blore and Lombard are unsatisfactory. But in the story, the General sends his wife's lover into a dangerous mission where death is a certainty, he doesn't shoot him. The servants drag their feet calling for a doctor when the woman they work for is ill, they don't smother her. Blore falsifies evidence that gets an innocent man put in gaol where he dies, and Lombard and the other white men clear out with all the supplies, leaving the native peoples to die.

Each of these people can convince themselves they didn't really do wrong, but of course the guilt and them knowing why they did what they did is gnawing underneath. That's what makes those characters so interesting. And by changing their backstories, it makes Emily Brent's seem really out of place considering that is kept much more like the book's backstory.

I don't know if I'm explaining it well, sorry. There's a great exchange in the book where Emily Brent and Vera Claythorne are talking about Lombard and what he did and Emily Brent is saying how wicked it was, and Vera says: "they were only natives", and Emily responds: "Black or white, they are our brothers". There's more nuance here, and you can almost see Christie putting these issues onto the reader too. These are crimes, she seems to be saying, and perhaps the reader would justify them too, but they all involve the taking of innocent lives.

(incidentally, I have a fondness for the 1945 version too, that was the first I saw as a child on one of my grandparent's recordings from TV. The music was great. I've seen them all, but really only 2015 and 2015, and perhaps the Russian version too, seem to be watchable.)

by Anonymousreply 8July 17, 2021 3:08 AM

^really only 1945 and 2015, I should've said. Sorry!

Also, I've posted this before, I think, but if you haven't seen it and are a fan of this story, this is a really good watch. She touches on something I agree with too... I don't think they should've changed it to "soldiers" from "Indians". Change it from "niggers", yes I can see that, but there is so much to do with colonialism and othering in the story that is part of the theme of the book, and I think a clever adapter could do a good, if not uncomfortable, job with this. Given what Sarah Phelps has done in her other adaptations as time went on, I could imagine she may have wanted to keep more of a racial thing in there too but was unable.

Offsite Link
by Anonymousreply 9July 17, 2021 3:12 AM

Thinking over this some more today, I think one of the important reasons that the characters backstories were so 'shades of grey' too, is that it didn't have to be these 10 people, it could've been another 10 people. Christie throughout the novel drops these hints, I feel.

Lombard isn't the only white man in his group who abandons the natives, there were others who went with him. Blore sets up the innocent man with the help of other police. When Miss Brent turns her maid out of the house, she notes that the maid's parents wanted nothing to do with her either. I think it's stated that Anthony Marston is chosen out of many such young men. This is interesting in itself, how many of us could contribute someway to the death of someone else? If the people chosen are more active murderers, which is rarer, then it becomes about these people being different from us. I don't think that was Christie's intention. I think she wanted to show it could be any of us. And choosing such figures as doctors, judges, policemen etc, she's commenting on our ideas of what 'proper' society is.

Just my ramblings.

by Anonymousreply 10July 18, 2021 12:51 AM

Did one of the adaptations change the ending to have two survive?

by Anonymousreply 11July 18, 2021 1:10 AM

Originally, when Christie adapted the novel as a play, she changed the ending so the last two survive. There had to be a mechanism to have it all explained on stage, and that seemed to work.

Then, technically, the 1945, 1965, 1974 and 1989 movies all are adaptations of the [italic]play[/italic] not the novel. So the last two survive in all of these.

The Russian adaptation and the 2015 are adaptations of the novel.

by Anonymousreply 12July 18, 2021 1:35 AM

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pa3TmqOorZ6csm%2BvzqZmraCimq6le5FxbmpuYmaBbq7ErKtmmZeWwamtjJyfq6GjqbamedJmmKecXam1prqMrZ%2BeqpVixKa%2BxGalqKaVYsGmuoyloK2snJp6qrrDopinq12WsaK805qroqeeYg%3D%3D