A Film Canon

And Then There Were None artfully translates the central innovation of Agatha Christie's crime writing - a late, abrupt transition from the third to the first person - into a fusion of the two modes, such that every character on the island upon which the narrative takes place seems to be both author and object of a series of murders sufficiently autonomous to consume everybody, including the perpetrator. To this end, Clair translates his taste for shared space into a visual, rather than aural, register, replacing the musical refrains of his Parisian films with an observation-network in which each character is simultaneously observer and observed, the house that they share becoming a mere synecdoche for the tools of observation - keyholes, windows, binoculars, telescopes - that contain and separate them. Despite the association of this gaze with paranoia, Clair nevertheless manages to suffuse the film with the wry humour of the original, as if to identify the camera with Hals' unsmiling, yet undoubtedly comical, cavalier, a portrait of whom appears in the living room that, along with the kitchen, represents the main space in which this comedy tends to manifest itself, insofar as it relates to the peculiar subversion of etiquette that the murder's anonymity and proximity brings. In the same way, the cast is almost entirely made up of character actors (including Walter Huston, Judith Anderson, Barry Fitzgerald, Roland Young and C. Aubrey Smith), creating a charismatic panorama that both reinforces this wry humour, as well as ensuring that the deaths have a less functional import than in the novel, and the modified conclusion is no more contrived than necessary.