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Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This is one of Agatha Christie's most clever intrigues, and it has been filmed any number of times in very different versions. René Clair's version, however, is certainly one of the most outstanding.A party of prominent guests are invited out to an island to pass the weekend in a lush and peaceful environment, but none of them has ever met their host, whose identity grows constantly more suspect and mysterious as the intrigue develops and one after the other gets killed including the kitchen personnel. Roland Young is one of the party and an astute detective, but gradually he appears as the dumbest of them all, as they all keep spying on each other and suspecting each other. There is some diabolical humour in all this, René Clair never denies his wit and innovative qualities, but it isn't exactly funny like "The Ghost Goes West". Nevertheleess, it keeps you fettered to the last surprising moment, and no matter how impossible and improbable the intrigue may seem, it's all logical and ultimately makes sense . Of course, someone had to survive to be able to tell the tale.

And Then There Were None is directed by Rene Clair, has a screenplay by Dudley Nichols, is based on the novel by Agatha Christie and stars Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Roland Young, Judith Anderson, C. Aubrey Smith, June Duprez, Louis Hayward, Mischa Auer, Richard Haydn and Queenie Leonard.This 1945 adaptation of the novel which is possibly Christie's best is atmospheric and strangely funny considering the dark subject matter. There is plenty of suspense and a good spooky atmosphere. The characters behaviour and interaction is often very humorous, because they are all so different and some have very quirky personalities. You feel like you have actually gotten to know these characters and you are kept guessing until the end (unless you've read the book)as to who the killer is.Ten strangers are invited to spend a weekend in a house on an island as guests of Mr U.N. Owen. Once they arrive they discover their host is absent and that none of them has ever met him. On the first night a gramophone recording starts playing accusing them all of being murderers. One by one they start to be killed and the survivors must try and work out who amongst them is the killer.The films ending is very different to the books and is quite disappointing in comparison. It's odd that such a major change was made but I suppose it was done to make the story less bleak and disturbing.The entire cast are excellent with Judith Anderson, Barry Fitzgerald and Walter Huston deserving special praise. There's some wonderful camera-work, especially in the scene where Huston's character looks through a keyhole at someone else who is looking through another keyhole.

I've read almost all of Agatha Christie's novels, and this one has to be her definitive work, the darkest, the most intelligent, the one that truly keeps you guessing right until the very end. I like both English language versions of the film for different reasons. There is a quality to this production that defies the year it was made, a nice mix of suspense, intrigue and humour. Lombard is a real smoothy, and June Duprez is excellent as the beautiful but sad Vera Claythorne. My only annoyance is the switch in the ending, I wish they'd had the bravery to stick to the original ending, and not use the kop out stage play ending. The house and setting look really effective, it works, so much more so then a desert or even some other awfully imagined setting like a safari!

Sometimes a viewer can tell if a film has been heavily edited due to the production code. This is especially noticeable with some endings. It looks like the story should conclude one way, then it abruptly goes in another direction at the last minute, so that we have a more morally- correct resolution.This seems acceptable if there is something 'good' about it. But there are times when one wishes the ending to be morally incorrect, because the story should function as a realistic depiction of what happens when people do go bad and life does go wrong. These can be powerful films that teach powerful lessons.Another problem is that after the end of the production code, producers who remake these films with flawed endings often do not seem to fix them correctly. But occasionally, there is a remake that comes along that does return to the original source and lets the story play out the way the writer intended.And Then There Were None, with its remake called Ten Little Indians, is one such example. The updated version was made before the Hollywood production code was abolished, in 1965 in Europe. The cast may seem a bit inferior to the group of actors in the original, but the story is filmed the way Agatha Christie wrote it. A couple of killers are allowed to live happily ever after…and a mass murderer is allowed to commit suicide to evade justice.