AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 366, 28 June 1946, Page 30

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

(20th Century-Fox)

SIDE from wondering why on earth the famous French director Rene Clair bothered to employ his considerable talents in making it, I think the point

that most interested me in this version of an Agatha Christie "whodunit" was the change that has been made in the Aitle, and certain internal amendments depending on it. In Britain the film was called Ten Little Niggers, the reference of'course being to the old nursery rhyme about the unhappy band of little blackamoors who suffered, so to speak, from the law of diminishing returns. And this is quite a good basis for a thriller dealing with a group of ten assorted victims who are liquidated one by one in circumstances which roughly parallel those in the nursery-rhyme. In this country, however, and presumably also in the U.S.A., the film is called And Then There Were None. I can appreciate the reason for this change in America, it was no doubt dictated partly by the fact that the word "nigger" is offensive (and rightly so) *to a good many Americans, and partly also by a desire not to keep other customers (Continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) away from what might appear on the surface to be an all-Negro story. But what intrigues me is the fact that the nursery-rhyme round which the plot revolves is always referred to in the film s "Ten Little Indian Boys." I have never come across this version before, either in the nursery or out of it. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist; it is quite likely the wording favoured in America for the reason given above: but the point is that the setting of the screenplay is not American, but a lonely little island off the English coast on which the ten victims have been assembled for a macabre and murderous week-end. Apparently the British are now to have their © nursery-rhymes amended for the sake of Anglo-American relationships, in much the same way as it is no longer considered polite for the BBC to refer to Dvorak’s "Nigger" Quartet, I should perhaps add that these are speculations in retrospect. While the film was running my attention was sufficiently engaged (when I wasn’t looking for nonexistent evidence of the great M. Clair’s individuality of technique) in conjecturing whether Mischa Auer would be the

first to die by choking his little self; whether it would be Roland Young or Sir C. Aubrey Smith who would chop himself in half (as it happened it was neither); and whether Walter Huston would predecease -Barry Fitzgerald, or vice versa. I won’t tell you who survives this elimination contest arranged by the unpleasant "Mr, U. N. Owen" (Unknown, get it?), but since Louis Hayward and June Duprez are the only young and romantic members of the party, you may safely draw your own conclusions.