As everyone and his Uncle Max knows Hollywood is run by accountants rather than creators so it's ironic to discover that accountants can't count; having changed the title of Agatha Christie's novel from Ten Little Indians (which was itself a subtle change from Christie's original Ten Little N*****s) to And Then There Were None and having changed the title figured why not change the ending as well so that now the correct title should read And Then There Were Two.
Christie went to great pains to construct a plot in which all the ten people on a small, uninhabited island, died one by one leaving no one alive and a 'solution' in the form of a suicide note written by the murderer before taking his own life. It was, of course, as improbable as any of the 'locked door' mysteries penned by Christie herself and/or any of her rivals in the genre but improbable is not quite the same as not technically feasible but since when has Hollywood left a novel/play, etc unmolested. If you answered 'never' you're close. So, not content with changing the names of some of the characters they also throw in a happy ending in which the two survivors are not only the two youngest members of the group and one of each sex but are also implicitly bound for the altar. That being said Rene Clair makes a decent enough fist of this, the seventh and last of the films he made outside his native France in a roughly ten-year period. Perhaps wisely he selected his cast from the ranks of 'character' actors rather than stars - or, perhaps more pertinently, no 'star' would be prepared to be killed on screen - but most audiences at the time would be familiar with virtually all of them - Judith Anderson had appeared in Laura, which was possibly still showing, Barry Fitzgerald had copped an Oscar the previous year for Going My Way, Richard Haydn had featured as one of the seven dwarfs/professors in Ball Of Fire, June Duprez was the female lead in The Thief Of Bagdad, etc. Clair did his best to bring a little visual flair to what is essentially a one-set piece, the actors got their lines out without bumping into the furniture (at least not intentionally) and a reasonable time was had by all including the viewer. Not perhaps one to treasure or buy on DVD but certainly worth catching on television.
Christie went to great pains to construct a plot in which all the ten people on a small, uninhabited island, died one by one leaving no one alive and a 'solution' in the form of a suicide note written by the murderer before taking his own life. It was, of course, as improbable as any of the 'locked door' mysteries penned by Christie herself and/or any of her rivals in the genre but improbable is not quite the same as not technically feasible but since when has Hollywood left a novel/play, etc unmolested. If you answered 'never' you're close. So, not content with changing the names of some of the characters they also throw in a happy ending in which the two survivors are not only the two youngest members of the group and one of each sex but are also implicitly bound for the altar. That being said Rene Clair makes a decent enough fist of this, the seventh and last of the films he made outside his native France in a roughly ten-year period. Perhaps wisely he selected his cast from the ranks of 'character' actors rather than stars - or, perhaps more pertinently, no 'star' would be prepared to be killed on screen - but most audiences at the time would be familiar with virtually all of them - Judith Anderson had appeared in Laura, which was possibly still showing, Barry Fitzgerald had copped an Oscar the previous year for Going My Way, Richard Haydn had featured as one of the seven dwarfs/professors in Ball Of Fire, June Duprez was the female lead in The Thief Of Bagdad, etc. Clair did his best to bring a little visual flair to what is essentially a one-set piece, the actors got their lines out without bumping into the furniture (at least not intentionally) and a reasonable time was had by all including the viewer. Not perhaps one to treasure or buy on DVD but certainly worth catching on television.