Peter Viney's Blog

Ten Little Indians
1965

Directed by George Pollock
Screenplay by Peter Welbeck and Peter Yedham
Based on the 1939 novel by Agatha Christie
Music by Malcolm Lockyer

The 60s retrospective series

CAST
Shirley Eaton – Ann Clyde, a secretary
Hugh O’Brian – Hugh Lombard (actually Charles Morley), an engineer
Stanley Holloway – Mr Blore, private detective
Dennis Price – Dr Armstrong, doctor
Wilfred Hyde-White – Arthur Cannon, judge
Daliah Lavi- Illona Bergen, film star
Leo Genn – General Mandrake, soldier
Fabian – Mike Raven, pop singer
Marianne Hoppe – Elsa Grohmann, cook
Mario Adorf – Joseph Grohmann, butler
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Christopher Lee (uncredited) – voice of “Mr U.N. Owen.”

Released June 1965

There was also a 1945 film directed by René Clair, And Then There Were None, a 1989 film Ten Little Indians starring Donald Pleasance, and a 2015 3-part BBC TV Christmas-period series, also And Then There Were None. That starred Charles Dance.

Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel was re-titled And Then There Were None, because its original title was unacceptable in the USA. So unacceptable that those advertising original copies on ABE Books choose to partly obscure the title. It sold 100 million copies to make it one of the best-SELLING books of all time, and the best-selling mystery of all according to Wikipedia.

For much more on Agatha Christie and versions of And Then There Were None, see Paul F. Newman’s 2007 article: Agatha Christie: Deduction in a dell’arte mask reprinted on this site.

British editions 1939-1963 …

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Unbelievably, the original UK title was still in use and in print in 1963, but this 1965 film changed it to Ten Little Indians. The Fontana 1963 paperback manages to offend deeply in at least three ways.

Inevitably Indians (for Native Americans) became non-PC, though not as non-PC as the original, so that in the BBC 2015 version they changed the offending rhyme again to Ten Little Soldiers ( as in the most recent reprints of the novel)

Ten little Soldier Boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine.
Nine little Soldier Boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight.
Eight little Soldier Boys travelling in Devon; One said he’d stay there and then there were seven.^[10]
Seven little Soldier Boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in halves and then there were six.
Six little Soldier Boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five.
Five little Soldier Boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four.
Four little Soldier Boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three.
Three little Soldier Boys walking in the zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two.
Two little Soldier Boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one.
One little Soldier Boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.

Obviously it has a cast of just ten. The 1945 and 2015 versions are set on an island. The 1989 version shifts it to an African safari camp, but this 1965 film is set on an isolated snowy mountain, accessible only by cable car or by climbing a sheer cliff. In spite of that impossible to reach location, someone has managed to build a mighty castle on top (filmed in the Tyrol). That Austrian castle has classic English country house interiors complete with suits of armour (and was filmed in Ireland).

Eight people have been invited there by Mr U.N. Owen (Unknown). The butler and cook have been engaged by an agency and have never met the owner. Every bedroom has the macabre rhyme on the wall, and there is a bowl with ten Indian (Native-American) figurines on the edges.

None of them know each other, nor the host. On the first evening a tape is played (the butler was instructed to start it) and each of the ten, including the staff, is accused of murder (or killing). Each are destined to die according to methods described in the rhyme. Let me follow Agatha Christie’s theatrical The Mousetrap rule and not disclose whodunnit.

The film posters advertised a one minute “Whodunnit break” just before the end where the cinema audience was invited to discuss their suspicions with their neighbours before all was revealed. If it was like our local 60s cinema the people in the seats behind would have been voicing their opinions all the way through. We watched it on Talking Pictures on TV, and there are so many long advert breaks that discussion was exhausted by that point. By then I assume only three were left … Talking Pictures skipped the Whodunnit Break.

It’s only 90 minutes long, and a tad late for black and white, which gives it an air of B-feature. The cast are mainly character actors,. sticking to the characters that made them such. At one point I suspected the killing off was based on ‘weakest actors first’ as Fabian is the first to go. He gets to sing the rhyme at the piano (and told to stop that infernal noise) and takes another swig of his drink which has been laced with cyanide. His quiff was well past its Best Before date by 1965 and we weren’t sorry to see it go.

Then the cook goes early in a cable car crash (the cable has been partially severed), relieving the viewer from more heavily-accented wailing. Suspicion does not fall on her remarkably unperturbed husband, but he may have got fed up of”We should never have come here” too. Once the cable has been cut there is no way off the mountain. However, her husband has travelled with enough mountaineering gear to scale Everest, as one does, and tries to climb the sheer icy cliff. His rope gets totally severed by an unknown hand with a knife. (Do mountaineering ropes cut like butter, I wondered?)

Shirley Eaton gets to gratuitously strip and reveal the complexities of pre-tights female underwear every time she goes into her room. Elsewhere, the house has been designed with two rooms each sharing a central bathroom which results in much peeping through keyholes … though not at Ms.Eaton. One wondered about the preferences of the male peepers, but it was apparently just suspicion.

They decide to search the house for Mr Unknown in pairs, and then realize that no one gets killed while three of them are present. You groan when they suggest splitting into pairs and searching darkened cellars. Even Enid Blyton knew that this was a move that meant trouble.

The film changed the novel’s ending (originally a confession in a bottle) where everyone had died, to leave its two younger stars alive, and it turns out that they actually hadn’t murdered anyone, but were taking the blame for someone else. Ah! As Paul F. Newman’s article points out (I hadn’t known) this plot shift comes from Christie’s own play version from 1941 … the play was retitled Ten Little Indians in 1944. The play needed someone left alive to explain the plot, just as Fortinbras of Norway is essential in Hamlet to come on and carry off the dead bodies before the curtain call … because Shakespeare’s theatre had neither lights nor curtains.

In the end, Agatha Christie is comfort viewing for a cold post-Christmas evening … Poirot or Miss Marples. Or a TV version or feature film of Murder on The Orient Express. We’ve got used to glossier versions nowadays with a strong sense of period … loads of money on costume. So this one falls rather flat. We went for it in the absence of a new Christmas Christie. You can rewatch ones you haven’t seen for years, but recent ones lose the ‘Whodunnit’ effect.

REVIEWS

It would be foolish to say this remake comes within a country mile of that former movie version, which was directed by René Clair. But it does have sufficient of the essence of Miss Christie’s strange and creepy tale of 10 strangers brought to an island to be weirdly killed, one by one, to make it a gripping entertainment for youthful (and unfamiliar) mystery fans.
Bosley Crowther, New York Times, 1966

Properly done, this old-fashioned brand of carnage can hardly miss. The remakers of Indians fail in every impossible way. By shifting the scene from a godforsaken island to an alpine retreat, they are able to engineer a couple of spectacular deaths among the crags, but the mood of boxed-in menace is effectively destroyed.
Time, 1966

THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …

The Six Five Special (1958)
A Taste of Honey (1961)
The Young Ones (1962
Some People (1962)
Play It Cool (1962)
Summer Holiday (1963)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
What A Crazy World (1963)
Live It Up! (1963)
Just For You (1964)
The Chalk Garden (1964)
The Carpetbaggers (1964)
Wonderful Life (1964)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1965)
Gonks Go Beat (1965)
The Party’s Over (1965)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Catch Us If You Can (1965)
Help! (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Ten Little Indians (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Nevada Smith (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Custer of The West (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
Girl On A Motorcycle (1968)
The Bofors Gun (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
Medium Cool (1969)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970)
Take A Girl Like You (1970)
Performance (1970)
Oh, Lucky Man! (1973)