And Then There Were None - 1974 film review

I enjoy many Golden Age detective novels, but if you press me for it (as happened on one of the panels at San Diego a few days ago), my absolute favourite has to be And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, not only an enduring global bestseller and hugely influential on crime writers to this day (how many homages to this book have been published in the last decade? I've lost count). The story is a superb combination of whodunit and psychological suspense. No surprise, then, that there have been plenty of screen versions.

One that has escaped me until now is the 1974 film directed by Peter Collinson. This movie has an indifferent reputation, but I decided I ought to check it out for myself. Collinson was capable of excellent work - he directed the original version of The Italian Job, a great piece of entertainment - and the cast is impressive. The producer was Harry Alan Towers, whose own reputation has not worn well at all, and he also wrote the script, under the pen-name of Peter Welbeck. He makes several changes to the Christie original, and although some are interesting, overall I don't think they work well.

The setting is weird - an abandoned luxury hotel in the middle of the desert in the Iran. So, effectively it's as cut-off as the island in the original story. There are some visual pleasures to be had from this change of scene, but too much is left unexplained. The climax isn't badly done, but the build-up lacks the necessary tension.

This lack of suspense is partly due to the fact that even the notable actors in the cast seem to be affected by a languor, possibly induced by the indifferent quality of the screenplay. Elke Sommer is beautiful and does her best with her part, but Oliver Reed seems to sleep-walk through his. Even Richard Attenborough and Herbert Lom are below their considerable best. The two ex-Bond villains, Gert Frobe and Adolfo Celi, make little impression, and why Orson Welles did the mysterious recorded message from U.N. Owen remained unclear to me. It's not a complete disaster as a film, but overall a waste of talent and of fantastic source material.     

The League of Gentlemen

For the first time in many years, I’ve watched The League of Gentlemen, the classic 1960 film from which the comedy show took its name. It’s a black and white movie, broadly in the tradition of the Ealing Comedies, and a thoroughly good period piece, as well as excellent light entertainment that has retained its charm and grip.

The film was based on a book published a couple of years earlier by John Boland. The story involves a redundant and embittered senior army officer, at odds with post-war British society, who hatches a plan to rob a bank. He decides to rope in a number of former military men who have fallen on hard times in the years since the war, and who have indulged in a variety of crimes or shady dealings, but who bring a range of skills to his heist team.

The ensemble cast is led by Jack Hawkins, at his imperious best, and is full of names who dominated British cinema and television for many years. They include Bryan Forbes, who directed (his wife Nanette Newman also has a small role), Richard – later Lord – Attenborough, Terence Alexander (best remembered as Charlie Hungerford in the long-running Jersey cop series Bergerac) and a host of other fine performers. Even Oliver Reed has a walk-on part.

It’s a movie quite different in style from The Italian Job, made only nine years later, but very much a product of the Swinging Sixties, while The League of Gentlemen harks bark to an earlier time. As for John Boland, he was a prolific thriller writer, but I am not familiar with his other work – though the success of his most famous book did prompt him to bring back the Gentlemen for subsequent adventures.