*Spoilers.*
The 2015 miniseries Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None is quite astonishing. It uses the book ending rather than the play ending (Christie wrote both).
Generally speaking, I prefer the play ending for reasons that I will list in the next post. But I have to extend kudos to the 2015 miniseries for pulling off the book ending with plausible panache.
In the book, everyone dies. It is the perfect master-plan, carried out to perfection by the murderer. Vera Claythorne and Philip Lombard, the final victims, die when Vera kills him, then hangs herself. As the murderer states, The police will arrive to find ten dead bodies and no answer to how it all happened.
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| Still from Endless Night |
If anything, the book proves that Christie was capable of a high level of horror/suspense. She accomplishes a similar sense of dread in Endless Night and in the unsettling novel Ordeal By Innocence. Both these books have been translated into superb movies, the first starring Hayley Mills and Hywel Bennett, the second starring Donald Sutherland. Both movies closely follow their books and scupper the ridiculous notion that Christie had no appreciation or understanding of the dark side of life/literature.
For the play version of And Then There Were None, Christie altered the ending. The viewers learn that Vera and Philip are guiltless of the murderer's accusations (the murderer is killing off people who got away with crimes) and work together to outlive the murderer.
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| Vera Respectable |
As stated above, the 2015 miniseries retains the book ending and for a depressing ending with no redeemable features, it holds up surprisingly well. One reason is the stellar company: Aidan Turner, Miranda Richardson, Sam Neill, Charles Dance, Toby Stephens... Every character is perfectly cast. Maeve Dermondy as Vera delivers a masterful performance as the bad girl who pretends to be a good girl who is far more ruthless, far more of a survivalist, than any of the other characters except possibly Philip (Aidan Turner). And even he can't match her in the end. (Dermondy's portrayal of Vera's final desperate and self-serving bargaining with the murderer hopefully has won her some awards.)
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| Vera Less Respectable |
The island setting is perfect (how I always imagined it!), and the time period carries a relevance that other versions fall to capture. It is 1938, immediately before World War II (the book was actually published in 1939). The world of civilized tea and deferential servants and "right" attitudes is about to be blow to smithereens.
Vera exemplifies a veneer that time would have stripped away in any case. Philip, as the ruthless mercenary, proves the only likable character, not because he hasn't done bad things but because he willingly sees beyond not only Vera's front but his own as well. He is one of two characters to fully admit to his crimes without justifying himself. Unlike the first character, his admittance is the result of full understanding and acceptance: he knows who he is and what he has done. Within a few months, he would have made an excellent commando.
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| Lombard's ruthlessness is only slightly |
| undercut by the utterly charming |
| tendency of Aidan Turner's hair to |
| curl at the slightest hint of humidity. |
And they are executed nonetheless.
To be continued . . .
* Personally, I don't mind "cozies," but I get tired of people so fundamentally misreading Christie's books.
9 comments:
If the ending of a mystery plot can be changed on a whim, doesn't that invalidate the story?
I think it depends on the type of change.
In the case of And Then There Were None, Christie retains the murderer and the murderer’s intentions as well as his plan and methods. She “merely” saves two of the characters’ lives. (The change does radically alter the theme between the two versions.)
With Witness for the Prosecution, Christie added a twist to the end of the play, a twist that was retained in the movie (great movie by the way). The twist is exciting (and actually quite funny in a dark humor kind of way) but in no way changes anything else about the story; it is the natural outcome of the characters’ temperaments.
When it came to adapting Appointment with Death, Christie actually changed the solution from murder to suicide. She played reasonably fair, backtracking between the book and the play to tweak clues. Still, I will admit, I find the alteration to Appointment with Death less satisfactory than the alteration to And Then There Were None.
And then there were books where Christie adamantly refused to change the ending, specifically the murderer’s identity, despite her publisher’s objections.
I suppose it’s the difference between writing a kind of epilogue and actually shifting the characters’ trajectories to force a specific ending—which latter approach brings me back to problematic television seasons :)
I'm reminded of Murder By Death.
I haven't seen it yet! I'm always meaning to (love my Peter Falk). Is it like Clue (with the several alternate endings)? Odder? Darker? Funnier?
Clue wasn't funny, so no, it's not like Clue. It's a comedy made funnier by the actors.
One of the odd things about Christie is that a lot of her books and out look on life is as cynical, or more so, than many of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. She's probably more cynical about human nature than say Robert Crais.
Christie seems to really believe that civilization is just a thin veneer.
Yeah, in many ways I think Christie would be in utter agreement with the end of Stephen King's article "Why Horror Movies" (although maybe not with the tone :):
The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized . . . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them . . . as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.
Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that.
As long as you keep the gators fed.
I think this element might be what separates Christie from many "cosy" writers no matter how much they may have been influenced by her. Just as Tolkien's religious beliefs and in-depth creation of Middle-Earth is what separates him from various fantasy trilogies.
I have to confess, I find it so tiresome whenever I see people complain about how previous dramatized versions of the story didn't use the novel's ending to the point where they drown out all discussion of how excellent the 1945 movie version is or how entertaining the 1965 remake is (the 1974 and 1989 versions though are terrible). One thing that is really not understood is how the 1945 version, while it retained the element of Vera and Philip surviving, did not do it the same way. Christie's stage version has a very improbable explanation for letting Lombard off the hook. It was Dudley Nichols, the writer of the script for the 1945 film who came up with the twist we're more familiar with in which "Lombard" is really Charles Morley, a friend of Lombard's posing as him because the real Lombard had killed himself after receiving Owen's letter. Vera is revealed to have been innocent of her crime because she covered for the guilty party. This works much better than Christie's stage version does frankly and it also works for the visual medium in which we can see a more believable "confrontation" with the real killer. The only thing I fault Nichols for not doing is retaining the novel's crime of Vera accused of drowning the nephew of her lover Hugo so he can inherit the estate that was denied him when his nephew was born. It could have been easy to flip things around so that Vera covered for what was really Hugo's crime and that Hugo then dropped her once she served her purpose (this was what the 2005 PC game did). The idea that Mr. Owen is ultimately "not infallible" actually works because it shows that a psychopath won't always be perfect.
I'll get this off my chest about the 2015 version, which IMO has become seriously overrated simply because everyone is swooning about the bleak ending being retained. People have overlooked how all the other bizarre changes to the nature of the crimes totally throw the structured nuance of the plot out of whack. Wargrave chose the order of death based on whose degree of guilt was less than others. But if we now have the General shooting his victim in the back, that's a more heinous crime than just sending him off on a hopeless mission. And why show Rogers smothering his employer to death? The point was that they withheld treatment which is more subtle and less provable. The problem with this version is they get WAY too explicit in how the past crimes were committed and consequently the element of the Judge deciding to dispense justice on those where the crimes could never be proved goes out the window. This to me is far more damaging to Christie's work than the fact that Vera and Lombard are alive at story's end. The less said about the idiotic change regarding Blore's crime, or the cocaine binging scene, the better.
The 1945 film is still the best version. I for one would like to see another version that properly retains the original cinematic ending and spares me the silly gore and dreariness that permeates the 2015 version from start to finish. (or maybe the solution is to do a production that has two different endings!)
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