Classic Films in Focus: AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (1945)

Long a staple of high school and community drama programs, Agatha Christie's stage version of And Then There Were None is a little less murderous than the original novel but still packed with good parts. The 1945 film adaptation, directed by Rene Clair, stocks those parts with truly memorable character actors, including Walter Huston, Judith Anderson, Barry Fitzgerald, Mischa Auer, and Richard Haydn, each in fine form as one of the condemned guests of the mysterious Mr. Owen. Invested with a mischievous sense of humor as well as a constantly growing heap of corpses, And Then There Were None moves quickly and handles its large cast well, giving each at least one good scene before the murderer removes that player from the game. The result is great fun, even if the viewer already knows the identity of the killer before the opening credits roll.

Eight guests and two house servants gather to spend the weekend on a remote island estate at the command of the secretive Mr. U.N. Owen, whom none of them seem to know. A recording soon informs them that their host is privy to their terrible secrets; each is accused of causing the death of another person and getting away with it. The guests are then rapidly dispatched, each in a way that corresponds to the nursery song, "Ten Little Indians," and every death is accompanied by the destruction of another Indian statue on the dining room table. Realizing that one of them must be the killer, the shrinking group of survivors tries to identity the murderer, but alliances within the group both help and hinder the process.

It's difficult to say very much about the mystery itself without giving away the ending, although most viewers who come to the movie will already know it from previous encounters with the frequently performed play. The conclusion does differ significantly from that of Christie's 1939 novel (the title also differs, and for good reason), although most of the characters carry over in somewhat altered forms. Christie's premise has been copied, parodied, and reworked countless times, but it's still a very good setup for a mystery, and the criminal conduct of most of the guests makes us fairly nonchalant about their deaths. The absence of a proper detective - Roland Young's dense Mr. Bloor definitely doesn't count - leaves the nervous survivors to figure things out for themselves, while the audience makes it own guesses as each new death removes another suspect from the list. No two deaths are exactly the same, although, this being Agatha Christie, there is a decided preference for poison overall, which helps to keep the women and older male characters in play as potential killers.

For movie buffs, the real pleasure of this particular production is the large and impressive cast, including Walter Huston as the alcoholic Dr. Armstrong and Barry Fitzgerald as Judge Quincannon. Both of those actors are celebrated for their strong character performances, and here they simply revel in their delightfully suspicious roles, especially when they join forces in the third act. Judith Anderson, best remembered as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (1940), plays the sanctimonious Miss Brent with heartless hauteur, while C. Aubrey Smith is rather tragic as the elderly general. Richard Haydn and Mischa Auer both play their characters for laughs, with Haydn as the long-suffering butler, Rogers, and Auer as the "professional house guest" prince. Sadly, Auer's character is the first to go, but he makes the most of his brief time on screen. Louis Hayward and June Duprez play the attractive young couple who fall for each other even as the murderer closes in, and they have fine chemistry together, especially when each suspects that the other might be the killer. Rounding out the crowd are Roland Young as the ineffectual Mr. Bloor and Queenie Leonard as the housekeeper, Mrs. Rogers, whose early death the other characters lament mainly because it deprives them of their cook.


If the black comedy of And Then There Were None appeals, follow up with Murder by Death (1976) or Clue (1985), both of which take their cues from Christie's plot. For more film adaptations of Agatha Christie, try Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and The Mirror Crack'd (1980). Rene Clair also directed The Ghost Goes West (1935), The Flame of New Orleans (1941), and I Married a Witch (1942). See Barry Fitzgerald in Going My Way (1944), where his performance earned nominations for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor (he won the latter). Walter Huston won an Oscar for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), but don't miss his wild performance in Kongo (1932). Look for both C. Aubrey Smith and June Duprez in The Four Feathers (1939), and catch Louis Hayward in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939). Oddly enough, both Richard Haydn and Queenie Leonard, who play a married couple in this film, provided voices for the 1951 Disney classic, Alice in Wonderland.

Classic Films in Focus: KONGO (1932)

Kongo (1932) certainly ranks as one of the stranger productions of the Pre-Code era and also one of the most alarmingly perverse. It began as a stage play and had already been adapted by Tod Browning in 1928 as West of Zanzibar, with the great Lon Chaney and Lionel Barrymore as the embittered rivals, but the MGM sound version benefits from the experience of Walter Huston, the actor who had originated the role of Dead Legs Flint on the stage. Huston might not be remembered as a man of a thousand faces, but he makes quite a grotesque spectacle as the picture’s insanely vengeful villain, who could give Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz a run for his money. Lurid, deliriously racist, and steeped in sadistic thrills, Kongo is a fascinating journey to the dark heart of classic horror for those with a strong enough stomach, but it’s by no means safe territory for the Pre-Code novice.

Huston’s Dead Legs Flint was paralyzed years ago when his rival, Gregg (C. Henry Gordon), crushed his spine and stole Flint’s wife. As part of his elaborate plan for revenge, Flint takes Gregg’s daughter, Ann (Virginia Bruce), as an infant and places her in a convent school until she is grown. Then he delivers her to a Zanzibar brothel for humiliating assault and abuse. After two years, he has her brought to his miniature empire in the Congo, where he rules the natives with a mixture of cheap magic and cruelty. When the drug-addicted young doctor, Kingsland (Conrad Nagel), stumbles into Flint’s camp, he rekindles Ann’s humanity, but he also attracts the interest of Flint’s nymphomaniac mistress, Tula (Lupe Velez). Flint wants Kingsland to operate on his damaged back, and he also has a final act of violent vengeance planned for Ann and Gregg.

Kongo shares many themes with Heart of Darkness, including a repulsively racist attitude toward the native Africans, but its focus is really on Flint’s maniacal obsession with revenge. He has an ugly, disfigured face to match his twisted soul, and he relishes the suffering he inflicts on Ann, treating her like a dog in his own house and encouraging her miserable dependence on alcohol. “How proud your father would be if he could see you,” he sneers. His sadistic streak extends to the natives and Tula, whose tongue he attempts to cut out when she disobeys his orders to keep Kingsland away from the addictive root he craves. Flint’s grand scheme requires his old enemy to come to the camp, confront Ann’s defilement, and then die so that Flint can have Ann burned alive in accordance with the local burial custom. After nearly twenty years of plotting, Flint seems poised to realize his horrible desire, but an ironic revelation casts a different light on everything he thought he knew.

Huston’s performance dominates the picture, but Virginia Bruce sells the fractured humanity of Ann very effectively. She really looks awful when we see her again after her ordeal in Zanzibar, with deep lines around her face and a wild, bestial quality in her movements. Conrad Nagel also revels in a sorry state as the drug-addled Kingsland, swinging between debauched euphoria and sober nobility. Bruce and Nagel have some very tender scenes in which they attempt to save one another from the nightmare world they inhabit, but their best moments as actors are their worst ones as characters. Once they get cleaned up they become more conventional and less memorable, but luckily their romantic salvation occurs very late in the picture. Lupe Velez plays the Portuguese Tula with more energy than subtlety; Tula’s chief ambition is to sleep with as many white men as possible, but her residence in the remote camp offers her limited opportunities, and it’s never really clear how the audience is supposed to feel about her.

Track down the 1928 film for a double feature comparison of the two versions. William Cowen only directed half a dozen movies, none of them particularly well-known today. Walter Huston, however, earned four Oscar nominations during his screen career and won Best Supporting Actor for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). For more of his work, see Dodsworth (1936), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Virginia Bruce also stars in Jane Eyre (1934), Born to Dance (1936), and The Invisible Woman (1940). Look for Conrad Nagel in The Divorcee (1930) and All That Heaven Allows (1955). Lupe Velez is best remembered for the Mexican Spitfire movies starting in 1940, but you can also see her in The Gaucho (1927) and Where East is East (1929).

Kongo is currently available for streaming on Warner Archive Instant; Warner has also released the film as part of its Archive DVD collection.

Classic Films in Focus: DRAGONWYCK (1946)

Although it’s not as well known today as Gothic thrillers like Rebecca (1940) and Gaslight (1944), Dragonwyck (1946) sprang from the tremendous vogue for romantic thrillers that those movies helped to establish during the 1940s. The picture was adapted from a 1944 novel by Anya Seton, and the late date of the source material helps us understand the story’s obvious affinities with du Maurier and her own muse, Charlotte Brontë. One of the first films directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Dragonwyck boasts all the flourishes of the classic female Gothic, but its chief attractions are the exquisite Gene Tierney as the imperiled heroine and Vincent Price as her broodingly Byronic spouse.

Tierney stars as Miranda Wells, who thinks her dreams have come true when a distant relative summons her to serve as a companion to his young daughter (Connie Marshall). It soon becomes apparent, though, that the imperious Nicholas Van Ryn (Vincent Price) has other designs on his beautiful cousin, especially after his wife (Vivienne Osborne) mysteriously dies. Despite the romantic overtures of a handsome local doctor (Glenn Langan), Miranda falls under Nicholas’ dangerous spell, and soon her own life is threatened as Nicholas becomes increasingly deranged.

Both Fox players, Tierney and Price had already appeared together in films like Hudson’s Bay (1941), Laura (1944), and Leave Her to Heaven (1945), but Price has a much larger role in Dragonwyck and therefore gets more opportunity to exercise his tremendous screen presence. His Van Ryn is more restrained than the horror characters he would eventually play, but already the outlines of the later Corman characters are clear. Price was handsome enough for a leading man, as Dragonwyck proves, but his particular talent for a cruel twist of the mouth made him far more entertaining as an antagonist. He has an undeniable sexual appeal that makes Miranda’s attraction to him credible, even though the lines of his face and the sarcastic light in his eyes inform the audience of his character’s true nature. Tierney has a complex heroine to play, for Miranda has to remain sympathetic in spite of the flaws that lead her to her fate. Her beauty encourages us to forgive her, and Tierney is at her most lovely in her gorgeous period gowns. The two stars find capable support in the secondary cast, with Glen Langan as the opposite of Price in nearly every way, Walter Huston fiercely righteous as Miranda’s God-fearing father, and Anne Revere kindly as Miranda's loving mother. Spring Byington provides a delightfully creepy performance as the housekeeper, Magda, who ominously warns Miranda of the mansion’s dark past.

Like most of the Gothic thrillers of the era, Dragonwyck has its roots in Jane Eyre, which had gotten its own big Hollywood treatment in the 1943 picture starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine. Miranda differs from Jane because she has the benefit of concerned, practical parents who worry over her dreamy notions, but still we have the unhappy first wife, the brooding anti-hero, and the lonely child populating the shadowy, history-haunted halls of the ancestral estate. Dragonwyck breaks away from the narrative arc of the earlier work in its second half, but its deviations still draw upon the conventions of the traditional Gothic, particularly in its use of the vengeful, wandering ghost and its evocation of the old story of Bluebeard and his wives. Those who are interested in the Gothic tradition will find its parallels and variations fascinating, although the film occasionally errs, especially when it drops characters like Magda and the little girl, Katrine, without explanation about halfway through the story.

Look for beloved character actors Harry Morgan as tenant farmer Klaas Bleecker and Jessica Tandy as Miranda’s Irish maid, Peggy O’Malley. For more from Joseph L. Mankiewicz, try The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), All About Eve (1950), and People Will Talk (1951). See Vincent Price in iconic horror roles in House of Wax (1953), House on Haunted Hill (1959), and Corman films like The Raven (1963) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). In addition to her previously mentioned roles, catch Gene Tierney in the wonderful Ernst Lubitsch classic, Heaven Can Wait (1943).

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.