![]() Where else are you going to get Richard Attenborough playing the morally corrupted Judge Cannon, alongside Oliver Reed’s dubious businessman, Hugh Lombard, Charles Aznavour’s weaselly entertainer, Michel Raven, Herbert Lom’s Dr Armstrong, Elke Sommer’s Vera Clyde, Gert Fröbe (Your actual Goldfinger) as Wilhelm Blore, and the vocal talents of none other than Orson Wells as “Mr U.N. The 1974 version, directed by Peter Collinson from a screenplay by Harry Alan Towers, is almost absurdly crammed with some of the best and most memorable acting talent on the planet at the time. Which brings us neatly to the 1974 version. A plot like that is why And Then There Were None has been adapted time and time and time again for theatre, TV and film – and often, when it comes to the film versions, some of the best actors of the age have bitten the hand off directors to be among the party. You’ve got to know that a plot like that is going to shift copies – and clearly, it has done. By the end of the plot, everyone is going to end up dead. The question of who the murderer is in And Then There Were None is an ever-switching game of Change Your Suspect, and the more you try to find any particular motive, the more unstuck you get, because it’s one of Christie’s purest “serial killer” novels – the murders are the point in And Then There Were None, there’s little that’s accidental or opportunistic about the fact of the deaths, despite a degree of opportunism being involved in quite who dies when. Alliances are formed, confessions made, red herrings deployed, and still the murders continue, all at least vaguely in line with a ghastly doggerel nursery rhyme, the rhyme seeming to taunt them as actual, real people die. ![]() In the book, ten strangers are invited to an island, only for it to be revealed by an unseen host that they are all murderers. In some respects, you can immediately understand the appeal. You could probably hazard a guess at it being an Agatha Christie novel, but with over 100 million copies sold, come in And Then There Were None, your number is up. Ever wondered what the world’s most popular mystery story is?
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