Rene Clair Its Specific Value

¶ … Rene Clair [...] its specific value in sociological perspectives. An interesting mystery that at first seems to have little implication for the Asian-American Pacific Islander, this film may have much darker sociological and psychological overtones.

And Then There Were None is a film adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel. The film opens with eight visitors riding in an open boat toward a deserted island where they have all been invited to spend the weekend. None of them knows each other, and none of them seems to have any connection to their unseen host, Mr. "U. N. Owen," or "unknown" to them all, even the two servants hired to oversee the guests during their stay. After their arrival, the butler plays a startling record that plays the nursery rhyme song "Ten Little Indians" with some violent alterations, and then accuses each of the ten people on the island of some form of murder. Then, the guests discover ten "Little Indian" figurines on the dining room table, just as the ten people begin to die. The first is the maid, wife of the butler, and when she dies, one of the ten figurines in the dining room mysteriously disappears. This continues, with guest after guest succumbing to gruesome murder. Finally, the group begins to take sides against each other and form alliances as the members continue to die, and the figurines continue to disappear. The guests continue to second-guess Mr. Owen, while suspecting he is on the island in secret - carrying out the murders when they least expect them. As the guests begin to really get rattled, they all confess they really did murder or kill someone, usually by accident, and they come to the conclusion that Mr. Owen is using his own brand of justice to bring them all to "trial." That is, all but two of the guests, who are not who they seem. Mr. Lombard is not really Mr. Lombard, and is so really not guilty, and Vera Claythorne is not a murderer, she simply took care of her sister, who was the real murderer. Thus, the "Ten Little Indians" were not all what they seemed and neither was Mr. Owen, who turned out to be the Judge, who had very personal reasons for murdering the others. The film ended on a happy note, with Vera and Charles leaving the island after falling in love while solving the mystery.

The film itself was quite interesting and the plot line was convoluted, so it was quite difficult to make any sense out of the mystery until the very end, when the Judge revealed who he was and his motives for murder. Critically, the film was certainly from an earlier generation, where the characters were asexual, stereotypical, and quite two-dimensional. Throughout the film, the men banded together and ignored the women, while the women were portrayed as scheming and/or innocent. The women did not actively take part in the men's "investigations," and played a second part in most of the film. This is quite typical of literature and film of the time, but it is disconcerting when viewing it today. There was another aspect of the film that developed as the characters began to die that what quite disturbing. First was the portrayal of the Indians in the nursery rhyme. Their deaths were violent, and they certainly portrayed as minorities, and how minorities were viewed at the time. In addition, as the guests began to group together and form alliances, it seemed the film could be referring to the alliances of the Allies against Hitler and Japan in 1945. There were different groups forming alliances in the film, and they could have represented the alliances of Britain and the United States against Germany, Italy, and Japan. There were also veiled insinuations about other races, such as when one of the guests comments that the Butler could not be the killer, because the "shape of his head" indicated he was not smart enough to come up with the idea. This could have referred to the Japanese, who were consistently portrayed as buck-toothed, slant-eyed, black-haired caricatures in the newspapers of the day. Critically, the film was certainly not the best acted or filmed movie of the day, but the plot was excellent, and the mystery was convoluted enough to not be able to figure it out until the very end. However, the undertones were disturbing, and distracted from the other elements of the film that worked. Prejudice was certainly active and accepted at the time, and this film seems to be an excellent example of both good writing, and a heavy dose of discrimination thrown in for added interest.