Agatha Christie Read online

  It is to be regretted that these projects did not attract talent of the calibre involved in such similar films as Gaslight and Night Must Fall, both using popular melodramas as their source material. Love from a Stranger, however, was not the most filmed of the Agatha Christie subjects. This distinction undoubtedly goes to And Then There Were None, of which the first official version was made in Hollywood in 1945, two years before A Stranger Passes.

  This remarkable film is one of the most successful attempts to put its author on the screen and deserves serious attention. Entrusting the direction to the French director Renè Clair was a curious decision on the face of it. Throughout the thirties Clair had been regarded as the leading European light comedy talent in film-making. While many of his films do not justify the awe in which they were once held, all have his special elaborate visual gags, such as the wedding party circle kissing one another, shot straight downwards for Italian Straw Hat, the rooftop chase involving an escaped lunatic, the police, the head of the underworld and the lottery winner’s creditors in Le Million, or the suicide’s gun flung on the gaming table in the state where the barter economy operates, thus winning the player a stack of pistols in The Last Millionaire.

  One would have to search way back into the silent period and films like Prey to the Wind to find a straightforward mystery movie in Clair’s work. However, the audacity of choosing him to make the Christie subject paid off remarkably. The film was cast with some of the best character players in Hollywood – most gifted comics like Roland Young, Mischa Auer, Sir C. Aubrey Smith – and backed with some of the best technicians, designer Ernest Fegte of The General Died at Dawn fame and René Hubert, who costumed the Korda films, among them. In these hands the story’s more macabre elements were kept well in hand and the unexpected casting of these assorted comedy talents in apparently straight parts upset the audience’s anticipation and helped the suspense.

  Possibly the only overt trace of the Clair style was in the through-the-key-holes sequence where the wary survivors watch one another. Elsewhere one notices such intriguing devices as the mysterious figure, identified by a cat, long before Welles’s The Third Man; particularly memorable was the match-lit confrontation between Walter Huston’s Dr Armstrong and Barry Fitzgerald’s Judge Quinncannon, when the power fails in the deserted mansion to which the victims have been invited. These two superb performers carefully assessing one another in a situation where each is in peril of his life is Agatha Christie and Hollywood of its great period at their very best.

  Clair’s Hollywood films varied both in their success and their quality, but the widely held belief that they fell below the level of his European work is totally bogus and with And Then There Were None, his last American film, he achieved a situation where he was able to use the enormous resources of the American industry to their fullest extent.

  The story was to be filmed twice more. The 1966 version was set in the Austrian Alps and made for Harry Allen Towers by George Pollock – veteran of the Miss Marple adventures at that stage. The film also assembled and largely squandered the talents of a gifted cast, notably Stanley Holloway as the overbearing William Blore, Dennis Price as Dr Armstrong, Leo Genn in the C. Aubrey Smith character, General Mandrake, and the menacing German actor Mario Adorf as the butler. Poor Daliah Lavi was not attractively photographed but Shirley Eaton, her career revived by Goldfinger, got an unusually provocative love scene (an innovation for the Agatha Christie films) with Hugh O’Brian, fresh from being TV’S Wyatt Earp. The film’s many murders are free of gore, however, and while the death of the brunette (as if Christie victims were colour-coded) and the wandering about the deserted snow-country hotel recall the Marple films, the production values are closer to those of the cheap Merton Park thrillers. The film’s one innovation is its most interesting element. Before the final revelation we have a ‘Who-done-it’ break – a sort of composite of the flashback explanation of the thirties detective films and William Castle’s Fright Break. In this, the murders are recapped against the clock while the audience is supposed to ponder the solution.

  Following the success of Murder on the Orient Express, Towers dusted off the script of this film and proceeded to make it again as And Then There Were None (Ten Little Indians in the States), in 1974. This time the events take place at the Shah Abah Hotel in Isfahan, Persia, and the colour photography is the film’s greatest asset. Where Marrianne Hoppe had died in the ski-lift crash in the 1966 film, Maria Rohm is executed traditionally by strangulation on one of the pillars of the ruins, which Oliver Reed described as ‘about two thousand five hundred years old – give or take a century’.

  Once more an intriguing cosmopolitan cast is assembled and used to little effect, with the European players poorly post-synchronized. Charles Aznavour’s cabaret star does one of his own numbers where Fabian’s Mike Raven the pop star, (!) had had to content himself with very ordinary material, but the match-lit dialogue – here between Herbert Lorn and Richard Attenborough – is totally outclassed by the Clair film. However, fifties sex-kitten Elke Sommer still shows a welcome willingness to discard her black blouse and Morricone’s conductor, Bruno Nicolai, doing one of his imitation Morricone scores, is better than the routine music of the earlier remake.

  In charge of this last version was Peter Collinson, who once looked like the hope of the new British films of the late sixties but only with The Italian Job delivered. His set-pieces are pretty tame – the camera circling the dinner table with the guests facing the ten ceramic Indians, Gert Frobe’s dubbed ‘Martino’ echoing through the empty cellar or Richard Attenborough’s red-faced death. The identity of the mysterious Mr U. N. Owen, so puzzling to a decade of bit players, is hardly concealed; we all recognize the tape-recorded voice of Orson Welles instantly.

  While these are the official versions of the Christie story they are far from the only attempt at filming it. And Then There Were None has joined The Cat and the Canary or The Maltese Falcon as one of the standard movie plots. It cropped up again as Breakheart Pass and the reason that James Garner gave for leaving the enormously popular Maverick series was that the producers had made him do the same script five times and it wasn’t original even then. It had been And Then There Were None.

  The first film to be made from an Agatha Christie original in the ten years after A Stranger Passes was an adaptation of her enormously successful stage version of Witness for the Prosecution.

  The film had a certain suspense element outside of its subject in posing the question of how a 1957 audience would react to what was basically a thirties courtroom murder mystery. The author could scarcely have been better served. Billy Wilder, already the director of Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard and The Seven Year Itch, had been asked to read the script and give an opinion for producer Arthur Hornblow, for whom Wilder had often written and once directed in his early years. Instead of an outside nomination, Wilder proposed himself as director and with him came an ambitious and very individual two-hour adaptation.

  Wilder’s previous film Love in the Afternoon had been made in Europe and hadn’t performed all that well, so for this he installed himself on Goldwyn Studio’s Stage Four. However, the previous film’s famous art director Alexander Trauner was in charge, so the £75,000 Old Bailey replica and the film’s other decors were executed with great imagination. One remembers the sinister narrow corridored view of the prison or the sound stage Oxford Street, in which the London buses are only seen as reflections in the shop windows. The film’s picture of then-contemporary London might not convince but it was the same remove from reality as the courtroom theatricals of the text.

  Black and white photography had seemed doomed with the arrival of wide screen but films like Witness for the Prosecution reprieved it for another twenty years, with Russell Harlan’s lighting etching the scenes like a steel engraving. The other technical credits were also assured but the film’s great joy was its casting, with Charles Laughton’s ailing, histrionic barrister superbly wringing laughs out
of the leading part, which Francis L. Sullivan had played straight on the stage. With superb control Marlene Dietrich made the part of the client’s German wife one of the cinema’s great virtuoso performances, a role not too distant from the one she had played under Wilder in A Foreign Affair. John Williams, Henry Daniel and Torin Thatcher made up the perfect team of gentleman lawyer foils and playing the part of the nurse for laughs gave great range to Elsa Lanchester. Even Tyrone Power’s ageing juvenile features with ‘Captain Marvel’ eyebrows were perfectly suited to the part of Lennard Vole, accused of murdering the rich woman whose recent will turned out to be in his favour.

  Wilder made the comedy material very much his own, with scenes like Laughton’s Sir Wilfred snatching the calcium shot-needle, which Lanchester’s Nurse Plimsol brandishes as she descends in the chair lift, and using it to pierce his forbidden cigar, or his comment as they lay out his medication that ‘The judge will be asking for a saliva test’. There’s Power nervously offering a light to Dietrich after he has given her a choice between cigarettes and chewing gum and she has taken the latter. The details are superbly handled, as with the incriminating marriage certificate followed round the court till Laughton waves it aside as his surprise evidence will be passed about in the final stages of the action, and the cook’s nervousness with the microphone which contrasts with Dietrich’s glacial calm. The film craft is exceptional, with the framing carefully excluding scene-stealing Laughton from the wide shot in which Power gives his testimony, or the montage of London location scenes which is still in progress over the actual witness for the prosecution line.

  Indeed these great talents at first seem to be wasted on old-fashioned material – old jokes like Sir Wilfred’s ‘What war?’ jibe, or his ‘I’m surprised that women’s hats don’t provoke more murders’, devices like the monocle shining in the face during the interrogation which Dietrich disarms by pulling the blind, or the time lapse indicated by the disappearance of the pills which Laughton has to take. The social comment is thin as in the reference to ‘those foreign wives’. However, the element of the law-as-theatre has been introduced with asides like ‘There’s no disgrace in being arrested Mr Vole’ or the audience craning forward to hear the plea – and soon we have the mutter that runs under the exchange about perjury with the jury turning to Dietrich. Gradually these elements become more pointed, as with Laughton’s superbly delivered reference to ‘the suspense of this horror fiction’ as he describes the damning testimony.

  The stage is being set for the quadruple twist of the authoress’s ending which, years after the film was made, still wrings spontaneous applause from the audience, even for those already familiar with the ingenuity with which it was conceived. There is not only the suspense of the verdict and of Sir Wilfred’s health – ‘Let’s hope we shall both survive’ – but the question of the true sequence of events left to be determined, and beyond that the vindication of Sir Wilfred’s position and the English legal system, so fascinating to world audiences from John Galsworthy through to QB VII with its outrage at the ‘You have made a mockery of English law’ subclimax.

  By removing any exact depiction of time and place and emphasizing the theatrical effect of the work, Wilder and his associates produced what was certainly the most remarkable film to be made from Agatha Christie material. Its continuing popularity is testimony to that.

  It is then surprising that the only film to follow up on this surge of enthusiasm was made three years later, the very minor The Spider’s Web. The Danzigers were an English company specializing in low-budget supporting films.

  The Spider’s Web was an attempt at a more ambitious production using colour and better-known players. Director Godfrey Grayson was one of the more skilled members of their stable and had shown a light touch in some of his smaller films. Unfortunately, the production was misconceived and passed without notice or effect.

  Glynis Johns and John Justin are the Hailsham-Browns, a diplomat and his wife based in the country house, Copplestone Court. While Henry is off collecting a foreign dignitary, Clarissa finds the body of the blackmailing husband of Henry’s former wife. This character played by Ferdy Mayne has threatened to take away little Pippa, the daughter of the first marriage. In a panic, Clarissa calls her guardian Sir Roland (Roly) Delahaye, a part which brings out thirties British comedy star, Jack Hulbert, in a comeback somewhat less dazzling than his old contemporary Jack Buchanan had just enjoyed with The Bandwagon. Roly’s plans to shift the body into the conveniently nearby woods are frustrated when the police, who have been alerted by a phone call, arrive and the further ploy of hiding it behind a secret panel is in turn upset by the local nosyparker, Miss Peake, played by Hulbert’s long-standing partner Cicely Courtneidge. The body of course keeps on vanishing and reappearing, once in Roly’s bedroom, before the murderer is unmasked and life at Copplestone Court can resume.

  Despite the discouraging example of The Spider’s Web, the Christie subjects were in for another burst of activity. MGM had possessed a studio in Britain at Borehamwood since the immediate pre-war days of American interest in British production. In order to keep the complex in operation – one of the last in Britain to employ contract technicians – the company made, in the sixties, a number of medium budget black and white co-features with British comics like Terry Thomas and Spike Milligan. With a five-week schedule, these films were often made by name technicians filling in between more ambitious productions and regarding them largely as a holiday.

  The first of these was the Agatha Christie Miss Marple mystery, the 1961 Murder She Said, based on 4.50 From Paddington, and starring Margaret Rutherford. This unique British comedienne had contributed her talent to several decades of British cinema, occasionally in films like Blithe Spirit but mostly in vehicles that were unworthy of her. She was to celebrate her eightieth birthday on the set of Murder Ahoy and to win an Oscar for her appearance in The VIPs shortly after, and she remained an immense asset in the part of Miss Marple. The release of Murder She Said coincided with a boom in an American interest in British eccentricity and it was decided to turn the film into a series.

  Unfortunately, these films were not to use the Rutherford potential as they might, being patterned on the Hollywood detective series of the forties and working for an uninvolving suspense rather than comedy. Further, the age of Margaret Rutherford and her contemporaries whom she always worked into the productions (her husband, the amiable Stringer Davies was a regular character) meant modifications to the shooting methods, such as breaking up the longer speeches more than they might normally have been in order to make memorizing them more simple.

  Director George Pollock, who had assisted David Lean on Brief Encounter, was as much involved in engineering devices like this as in developing the suspense and comedy elements. Three of the four films of the series were written by the team of David Pursall and Jack Seddon and the series was constructed very much to formula, with a murder attracting Miss Marple’s attention and bringing her into contact with some juveniles and some name character comics until enough of them got murdered for the guilty parties to be singled out by an ingenious trap set by Miss Marple to the bemusement of Charles Tingwell’s Inspector Craddock. The films had sequences of talk-bound deduction and all featured long scenes of the innocent parties thanking Miss Marple for her efforts in clearing their name. The few laughs came from Margaret Rutherford’s appearance in a variety of curious outfits or gamely undertaking such enterprises as doing the twist or fencing under the supervision of an Olympic champion. Still, Ron Goodwin’s theme was catchy and enjoyed a certain popularity in its day.

  Murder She Said, made in 1961, enjoyed a remarkably strong cast, including of all people Arthur Kennedy, with James Robertson Justice, Muriel Pavlow, Ronald Howard and Thorley Walters. It is the best Rutherford performance in the role and significantly is one of Dame Agatha’s murder-on-a-train mysteries. Murder at the Gallop (scripted by one James Cavanagh) starts off with the Agatha Christie preoccupation with cats
once again and soon Miss Marple is investigating the death of a recluse and snooping about The Gallop, a riding school run by Robert Morley’s Hector Enderby with Flora Robson looking on suspiciously.

  Murder Most Foul (1964) starts with Miss Marple’s disagreement with her fellow jurors over a young prisoner’s guilt and soon finds her enrolled in Ron Moody’s local ‘Cosgood Players’. The final film, Murder Ahoy, has her analysing poison samples which send her off to upset the smooth running of Captain Lionel Jeffries’ training ship.

  The series had proved modestly popular and the contact with the author, who took an interest in the productions, continued. (When Mrs Christie wondered if she could have the naval gun mountings used in Murder Ahoy for an antique cannon she owned, one studio executive suggested she must be tired of firing from the hip.)

  It was hoped that a film would be made from The A.B.C. Murders – a Hercule Poirot adventure. Director Seth Holt and star Zero Mostel were retained and an adaptation made, which included a bedroom scene for Poirot. Dame Agatha was not amused and the production was abandoned on what was to have been the first day of shooting.

  The film did finally emerge in a Pursall and Seddon adaptation with Tony Randall directed by Frank Tashlin. Where the bulk of the previous films had used comedy business and atmospheric filmic passages to space out the Christie-style dialogue, Tashlin was a one-time Bugs Bunny director and talent behind the delirious Jayne Mansfield comedies The Girl Can’t Help It and Oh for a Man, and his style of film-making was quick-fire visual comedy. Thus his stamp is very definitely on The Alphabet Murders as the film was finally known. Things move from a striking opening, with the aquatic clown killed (in the deserted swimming baths) by a poisoned dart, which goes from the close-up of the dart striking his neck to the shot of his feet-upwards form falling away into the water. This surreal element is carefully emphasized with the shots of Anita Ekberg on horseback galloping through Kensington Gardens and a succession of killings, all with alphabetically succeeding initials. Soon we are at King’s Cross where a Scotland-bound express carries the coffin containing the body of Sir Carmichael Clark. The comedy element is mainly in the hands of Robert Morley’s Hastings, a British undercover man whose wife thinks he’s something in Agriculture and Fisheries and who keeps on getting his bowler-hatted dignity bundled into car boots as he attempts to protect Randall’s straight-played Poirot. Notice among the support Austin Trevor, our original Poirot. The Alphabet Murders is certainly the most stylish and amusing of the Agatha Christie ‘B’ movies and one can only regret that a series was not forthcoming.