You must admire the audacity of filmmakers who try to remake classic films \u2013 after all, it takes a lot of guts to attempt a production that exists solely to one-up its heralded predecessor. But that\u2019s not to say that it cannot be done \u2013 after all, William Wyler\u2019s \u201cBen-Hur\u201d and Martin Scorsese\u2019s \u201cThe Departed\u201d were remakes that won the Best Picture Oscar, while John Huston\u2019s \u201cThe Maltese Falcon\u201d and \u201cMoby Dick\u201d and Franco Zeffirelli\u2019s \u201cRomeo and Juliet\u201d were superior to earlier film adaptations of those beloved works.
\n<\/p>\n
But for every \u201cBen-Hur,\u201d there are hundreds of remakes that fall far short of their celebrated originals. One of the most egregious is the dreary 1965 \u201cTen Little Indians,\u201d which followed in the footsteps of the classic 1945 \u201cAnd Then There Were None,\u201d where 10 people are invited to an island off the English coast and are systematically murder in keeping with the rhymes of a grisly poem.<\/p>\n
\u201cTen Little Indians\u201d was designed to profit from the renewed popularity of Agatha Christie\u2019s mysteries generated by a series of jolly feature films starring Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple \u2013 even to the point of recruiting George Pollock, the director of the Rutherford outings.<\/p>\n
In fairness, \u201cTen Little Indians\u201d attempted to distance itself from \u201cAnd Then There Were None\u201d by switching its setting to a creepy chalet atop an Alpine peak. It also jazzed up the story by turning two characters into show business types \u2013 Fabian\u2019s pop singer and Daliah Lavi\u2019s movie starlet were decorative distractions, even though neither were very good actors.<\/p>\n
Alas, Pollock\u2019s directing skills \u2013 which resulted in crisp and sparkling Miss Marple romps \u2013 were absent in \u201cTen Little Indians,\u201d resulting in a slow-moving mystery that starts to wear out its welcome before the culprit is revealed. Even worse, \u201cTen Little Indians\u201d was shot in unimaginative black-and-white styling that exacerbates its dullness while giving the film a cheap B-movie look.<\/p>\n
While some fun can be plumbed from veteran British actors Wilfrid Hyde-White, Stanley Holloway and Dennis Price trying to one-up their castmates with their genial hamming, romantic leads Hugh O\u2019Brian and Shirley Eaton have no chemistry and barely carry the film through its twisty ending. Even more curious, the film has a William Castle-style gimmick called a \u201cWhodunit Break\u201d that pauses the story for a minute to enable audiences to discuss the possible identity of the killer.<\/p>\n
At least one person was enthralled with \u201cTen Little Indians\u201d \u2013 producer Harry Alan Towers secured the rights to the Christie property and remade it twice, in 1974 (with the setting moved to a hotel in the Iranian desert) and in 1989 (with the action taking place on an African safari). Those two versions emphasized campiness and were entertaining, albeit for the wrong reasons, while this 1965 trifle was a mild bore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You must admire the audacity of filmmakers who try to remake classic films \u2013 after all, it takes a lot of guts to attempt a production that exists solely to one-up its heralded predecessor. But that\u2019s not to say that it cannot be done \u2013 after all, William Wyler\u2019s \u201cBen-Hur\u201d and Martin Scorsese\u2019s \u201cThe Departed\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":47964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1369],"tags":[3718,3720,703,3719],"class_list":["post-47963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-retro-cinema","tag-agatha-christie","tag-and-then-there-were-none","tag-mystery","tag-ten-little-indians"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47963"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47966,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47963\/revisions\/47966"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}