Review: Ten Little Indians (1974)

Ten Little Indians

Rating

Director

Peter Collinson

Screenplay

Peter Welbeck (a.k.a. Harry Allan Towers)

Length

1h 45m

Starring

Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, Richard Attenborough, Stephane Audran, Gert Fröbe, Herbert Lom, Maria Rohm, Adolfo Celi, Alberto de Mendoza, Charles Aznavour, Orson Welles

MPAA Rating

Review

Less than ten years after the last starry attempt to bring Agatha Christie’s most popular work to the big screen, Ten Little Indians proves that repeated re-interpretation has diminishing returns.

Producer Harry Alan Towers, who wrote the script for the 1965 version under the pseudonym Peter Welbeck, does the same thing this go-round shifting the action from a remote mountain chalet to a remote hotel in the Iranian desert. Gathered together are the usual suspects, many with different names than in the novel, which is to be expected with his renditions of the film. As the eight unsuspecting guests arrive to join the two servants already there, the tension between them is high due to the remoteness of the location and not from any built-in suspense from the screenplay or Peter Collinson’s direction.

If the 1965 adaptation were less starry than the René Clair original, then this one is virtually starless. Elke Sommer, Gert Fröbe, Herbert Lom, Oliver Reed, and Richard Attenborough are the most noted names in the cast and none of them acquit themselves very well with the material. Reed plays Hugh Lombard with woodenness and aggressive hyper-masculinity. The defining moment comes when he forces himself upon Sommer’s inappropriately alluring secretary. By that point, the audience has already given up on getting something truly engaging and rather hope that it doesn’t get progressively worse, which it does. Attenborough’s seething, red-faced performance is perhaps the most aggressively overbearing.

The source material is sufficient for creating atmosphere, but the first English-language color production does not benefit from it, presenting washed out colors and a faux gloomy patina that doesn’t have the energy or ambition to be something vibrant and terrifying. The location is as exotic as expected with the Abbasi Hotel in Isfahan, Iran standing in for the desert-set locale. It’s a beautiful piece of architecture that is given poor representation in the film. Its vast courtyard and tall façade given only the barest of exposure with the entrance the sole element getting its fair shake at a couple of fitting moments in the film. There is one credit to the film, Bruno Nicolai’s groovy ’70s score. It doesn’t always feel fitting, but it adds a bit of lightness to an overly dramatic affair.

While Ten Little Indians may not have worked in this particular location or with these specific actors, it seems more the fault of Towers and Collinson than the material or the characters. And Then There Were None can overcome almost any flaw to be a riveting tale, but it must be told well and this film was not a great telling.