And Then There Were None (1945)

And Then There Were None is a story based on a novel by Agatha Christine. In the film 10 people are invited to a private island resort to meet a mysterious guest who never shows up. One by one the guests begin being murdered. The plot sounds kind of interesting, but overall it wasn't. The film drastically altered the book's ending which is usually a bad idea.

One problem I had with this film was the actors. The two main stars are billed as Barry Fitzgerald and Walter Huston. The costars were listed as Louis Hayward and Roland Young. They were all good enough, but having several people be bigger stars than the other people meant it was pretty obvious which ones were going to be the first to die....surely not them. While it is possible to kill the top-billed actor early on in a film (Janet Leigh in Psycho being the most famous example), this technique is rarely employed and it wasn't employed here. Some of the other actors were quite irritating but they died quickly so it wasn't too bad.

Overall, this film probably should have stayed a book. In a book there are no stars so the audience can be genuinely surprised with each death. Here, it was quite obvious which characters would die last. The only way to fix this would be to use no true stars, which would be bad for box office numbers, or surprise the audience like Hitchcock did. This film does neither and nothing else about this film is particularly great.

63/100
D-

UP NEXT: Either Autumn Sonata or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?