Before I discovered Hitchcock, I was obsessed with Agatha Christie for some time. (Before that James Bond, which confirms my Anglophile status, but that's another post). My favourite of the Dame's stories is And Then There Were None, previously titled Ten Little Indians, but (famously) originally titled Ten Little Niggers. The old Dame was clever, but not known for her cultural sensitivity.
Long before the idea became a cliche, Christie wrote an ingenious story about ten people who are invited to an island, and slowly killed off one-by-one by a sadistic murderer re-enacting a children's nursery rhyme. The pace of the novel is breathtaking. Of all her stories, this was one of the few read from cover to cover in the fewest of sittings. I think its success lies in the originality of the plot, and its good fortune to not be a run-of-the-mill detective story. The suspense mounts as the bodies fall, leading the reader to the dark, but inevitable conclusion. And it's that spectacular ending which places the book, in my mind, well above Christie's other work.
There were film adaptations, between 1945 and 1989. The first film, directed by Rene Clair is regarded as the best and fairly faithful to Christie's story, but far too dated to appeal to modern audiences. Then there are three films from B-grade producer Harry Allan Towers, each more outlandish than its predecessors. The 1965 film is set on a remote Swiss mountaintop, and featured the voice of Christopher Lee as the mysterious host, but is mostly forgotten, save for the 60-second "can you guess the killer" gimmick near the end. This was followed by the all-star big-budget 1974 film set in the Iranian desert, with Oliver Reed, Richard Attenborough, Elke Sommer, Herbert Lom, the voice of Orson Welles, and no less than two former Bond villians in Gert Frobe (Goldfinger) and Adolfo Celi (Thunderball's Emilio Largo). The film tanked. But that didn't stop Towers from making a third film, and the worst of his run, in 1989 starring Brenda Vaccaro, Frank Stallone, and Donald Pleasance. Seriously, Frank Stallone?
Despite their own intrinsic flaws, each of these films has the same common problem. The ending is a happy one, as each script was adapted from Christie's stage play, which in turn she adapted from her own novel. There are various reasons why she changed the ending, but none stand up in my mind. This is a seriously dark story, and deserves the seriously dark ending. Only an obscure Russian film adaptation had the balls to adapt the novel and not the play. Desyat Negrityat takes its name from Christie's original title, and is faithful to the novel's ending. While well made, it's unfortunately in Russian, and the DVD transfer is terrible... if you can get a copy outside of Russia. It took almost a year for my copy to be delivered.
Desperately wanting to see a decent screenplay adaptation, I even toyed with the idea some years back of trying my own hand at an adaptation, purely as an academic exercise of course. That idea went by the wayside, probably a week later, but fortunately there are better placed and more motivated Christie fans who have taken the initiative. Kevin Elyot has written seveal of the recent Poirot teleplays, and his new stage adaptation of And Then There Were None opened last Friday 14th October at the Gielgud Theatre. There are bill posters plastered all round London at the moment, so hopefully it will do well. I especially like the sly advertising tagline of "someone's taking the law into their own hands".
This is all part of a revitalised effort to market Christie's stories. Her descendants sold the majority of their interest in her work a few years back, to an entertainment company called Chorion that specialises in exploiting the merits of older artistic works. It also owns the copyrights to the works of Enid Blyton, Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Roger Hargreaves (famous for Mr Men and Little Miss). They've even licensed a new computer game based on And Then There Were None.
At short notice, I was fortunate enough to get a third-row seat at last night's show. The play is well-cast, and features a few famous cinema names like Gemma Jones (Bridget Jones' mother) and Sirens' Tara Fitzgerald. I really enjoyed the show, especially the over-the-top theatre tricks and slight-of-hand that made the audience, myself included, gasp and scream in horror. The play is quite faithful to the novel, with only a handful of changes. For obvious reasons the children's nursery rhyme has become Ten Little Soldier Boys, and the setting is now called Soldier Island. Most importantly, the ending is very dark, and will please the Christie purists. For staging reasons, this new play is not totally faithful to the novel, with room for improvement if ever adapted for the screen... but secretly, I'm thankful for that. ;-)
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