PG, 1 hr. 30 min. Directed By: George Pollock. Release Date:
Jun 1, 1965. DVD Release
Date: Mar 14, 2006.
I wanted to love this movie, because
it’s based on one of my favorite books ever.
Generally, I would try to avoid comparisons between a movie and its
inspiration film, but, I found myself having the same problem while watching
this movie as I did when I watched And
Then There Were None, the 1940s version of this very movie. That problem is, simply, that I find myself
vaguely disappointed by the film’s inability to live up to the images that
appear in my head while I’m reading Agatha Christie’s masterpiece.
I did suffer from this problem, but I’m going to
try to look at this as an isolated event, even though Christie's theme of elimination and murderous attrition have served as thematic inspiration for countless mystery and horror
stories for close to 75 years. I actually found some of the
creative license to be effective in this movie, particularly the transition
from Christie’s “Indian Island” to the chateau in the Alps… although the
transition did make the murderer’s use of the “Ten Little Indians” nursery
rhyme a little less obvious. I even liked the character swaps, because the
novel characters like Emily Brent wouldn’t translate well to a theater
audience.
But the “modernization” of the
classic mystery tale ran afoul of its own making. The ridiculously “modern” crafting looks VERY
dated the better part of fifty years later.
From my perspective, there’s too much about this movie that looked too
much like the Austin Powers movies
for me to be totally comfortable with them.
The addition of sex and graphic violence to the remarkably G-rated
inspiration story was… understandable, but somehow unpalatable, and again would
have created some sense of misunderstanding if I wasn’t familiar enough with
the story to quote about half the dialogue.
Which one of the Indians falls to their death in a gondola (is that the right word for those enclosed ski lift things?) or gets stabbed in the
basement? The last one actually reminds
me of a solution to the board game Clue. Haha! It was Dr. Armstrong in the basement with the knife! It wasn't really, or was it...?
This was certainly a fun movie, but
knowledge of the inspiration novel kept me from enjoying this as much as I
would if I’d been completely in the dark.
Damn my habit of actually reading.
If you haven’t read the book, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest
that this would be a fun way to kill some time.
However, don’t get me wrong, Ten
Little Indians is plagued by a ton of terrible acting. Fabian’s performance may be the earliest
example of the problem in modern Hollywood, where actors are picked solely for
their looks instead of for their talents.
His death scene is arguably the worst bit of acting I’ve ever had the
misfortune to see and I've been to more than my fair share of high school plays.
