MOVIE REVIEW : Critics and Cast Really Fell for Clair’s ‘None’

It’s easy to imagine how today’s slash-and-trash directors might react if the screenplay for “And Then There Were None” came across their desks.

A glance through Dudley Nichols’ adaptation of Agatha Christie’s famous novel, “Ten Little Indians,” might inspire a frenzy of bloody visions. Not one murder but 10! Not just two or three opportunities for carnage, but 10!

Hey, who can we get for special effects? Is the “Friday the 13th” guy available?

Back in 1945, a time when just the thought of murder was enough to chill an audience, director Rene Clair had a different notion: Let’s play it light, as much for grins as terror. We’ve got interesting characters, so let’s use them. And we’ve got an oddball plot, let’s take advantage of it.

These days, the result may seem stuffy--and as antique as a clue-finding magnifying glass. But that doesn’t diminish the movie’s uncluttered appeal. “And Then There Were None,” screening tonight as part of the Fullerton Museum Center’s “Comedies, Cults and Classics--Films You Won’t Forget” series, is a classic period whodunit.

Clair, a French director known early in his career for agile satires (“Le Million” and “A Nous La Liberte,” both in 1931) and, later, for more silly farces (“A Ghost Goes West” in 1935 and “I Married a Witch” in 1942), was working from well-proven material.

Christie’s book was so popular it was turned into a stage play and has been translated to the screen three times. After “And Then There Were None” came remakes in 1965 and 1975, neither as good as the original.

The basic story reads like a Christie recipe for the murder mystery: a diverse menagerie of people are brought into a musty setting, a basic but vague motive is provided, then the bodies start to fall. To both enliven and add some whimsy to the tension, wry dialogue and curious little red herrings are tossed in.

“And Then There Were None” opens with eight characters (played by Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, C. Aubrey Smith, Judith Anderson, Louis Hayward and Richard Haydn, among others) as they arrive on Indian Island (named because it resembles an Indian’s profile). Each, supposedly, has been involved in an earlier killing and now must face death themselves. They don’t know it, but their host, the unseen Mr. U. N. Owen, is a stickler for swift and painful justice.

Clair tells the tale with an offhanded, almost detached amusement. There’s respect for Christie’s novel mingled with the mild flippancy of someone who knows it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. He pokes you in the ribs while the villain is sticking in the knife.

All the actors have their moments--Huston is the one big disappointment, playing the genteel surgeon as if he were a country doctor from Iowa--but Haydn has the most as Rogers, the butler. Once he’s had a few drinks, Rogers lets his working-class resentments show, giving all these doomed bluebloods a dose of their own ridiculous haughtiness.

Rene Clair’s “And Then There Were None” screens tonight at 7:30 at the Fullerton Main Library, 3553 W. Commonwealth Ave., Fullerton. Tickets: $3 and $4. Information: (714) 738-6545.