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Ten Little Indians (1959) is a TV movie made from the Agatha Christie play And Then There Were None (1943), and chronicles the arrival of guests and staff at Indian Island for a weekend of revelry in a classic old Victorian house, supported by the mysterious generosity of Mr and Mrs Owen.
Mr and Mrs U. N. Owen.
Soon enough, the classic nursery rhyme Ten Little Indians is found inscribed colorfully on a wall, beneath which are ten Indian statues. It’s quaintly amusing.
Ten little Indian boys went out to dine;
One choked his little self and then there were nine.
The tension ratchets up when the butler plays a record on instructions from the missing Owens, but it’s not music, it’s a dry accusation of everyone in the house being responsible for one or more murders. Even the kitchen staff is unexcused. The sensibility of an imminent social faux-pas is upon us.
And then a guest collapses and dies while sipping a drink. Dr. Armstrong diagnoses cyanide poisoning, based on the symptoms of foaming at the mouth and … choking.
The bodies begin hitting the floor in earnest shortly thereafter, each echoing its line in the rhyme and always followed by a broken Indian statue, until, as the thunder crashes and the lights go out, only two are left, torn apart by the knowledge that it has to be one of them committing these revenge murders.
Right?
The production values are, unfortunately, fairly inferior, even for 1959, and the pace is just a trifle hurried. We never do really get to know anyone well enough to mourn their demise, or even cheer on their increasingly desperate failures. This is unfortunate, as it reduces the tension we could have felt for all these doomed people.
Still, it’s a lovely – and fortunately short – bit of fun.
