![]() ![]() That’s how sly some of the performances are. One by one, those figurines disappear, but the ending still comes as a surprise. ![]() With assured direction by Craig Vivieros, the two part miniseries rattles along like an on-time train. ![]() The story’s most compelling character is Lombard (Aiden Turner), an adventurer/gun-for-hire who immediately owns up to the charge of murder: Yes, he says, he did kill an entire village of African natives (the novel says that Lombard did so out of self-preservation, to steal food and supplies for his expedition, but the film’s flashback implies that he did so as a Colonial usurper-he had weapons, he conquered.) But when confronted by Miranda Richardson’s nasty, scripture-quoting charity worker, he sneers that religion-her religion-is as big a killer in Africa as the gun. Though the screenwriter retains the class-distinctive diction of the book, she infuses the new version with a modern sensibility. And so does the TV screenplay adaptation by Sarah Phelps. "And Then There Were None," set in 1939, when the whole world seemed to be on the edge of apocalyptic war, reflects that changing morality. In her last works, killers lack any semblance of morality or guilt. Confessions, when they come, can be as vicious as the killings themselves. ![]() Victims die horribly of poison, sometimes in front of their loved ones, and murderers are motivated by savage emotions: jealousy, greed, a general callousness toward others. Though her novels are usually described as “cozy”-indeed, most of the Golden Age crime fiction is labeled thus for its lack of gore and violence-there’s a great deal of brutality in her work. In this superior adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel, yet another top-drawer collaboration between the BBC and A&E/Lifetime, the real secret host is Christie herself-a master of suspense and a keen expert on the darker shades of human nature. A drug overdose or something more suspicious? (The victim was a coked-up playboy.) The guests, including a judge ( Charles Dance), a WWI general ( Sam Neill), a wealthy do-gooder ( Miranda Richardson), and two creeping servants ( Noah Taylor and Anna Maxwell Martin) trade tales of misleading invitations from their elusive hosts, a millionaire couple whom no one has ever met. Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily ’s correspondent.Almost before the terrified, defensive guests can stammer that how they’re all completely innocent, someone drops dead at the dinner table. I’m sure it will qualify as cozy British comfort viewing here. It remains one of the best-selling books of all time the latest miniseries has been an enormous hit in the UK. And the story-of people being confronted with secret crimes from their past, and punished for them-is otherwise identical. But if you do an image search for that original title, it jars, viscerally. In the widely known “And Then There Were None” version, we’re merely faced with fantastic amounts of violence, and a rhyme so macabre and distressing one doesn’t hear it now outside of the Agatha Christie context. If her story suggests how easy it is to play upon such fears, it is also a reminder of how intimately tied they are to sources of pleasure and enjoyment. As the critic Alison Light has written, renaming the island actually did make a difference in its initial form itĬould be relied upon automatically to conjure up a thrilling ‘otherness’, a place where revelations about the ‘dark side’ of the English would be appropriate … Christie’s location is both more domesticated and privatized, taking for granted the construction of racial fears woven into psychic life as early as the nursery. Of course, something that was considered racially problematic pre-1940 has not become less so with the passing of years. And then there are the figurines at the center of the table … They’re constantly singing and reciting it. A copy of the rhyme hangs in each guest’s room. The remote isle where the characters are taken is now called Soldier Island-but you do the math. Even so, consider the sheer number of times the epithet is referenced in the novel. Perhaps you’ve seen the BBC miniseries previewed above. “Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None,” is, of course, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians-which was originally, notoriously, released serially in the UK under the title Ten Little Niggers. (This was the British music-hall version of the minstrel song.) Even in 1939, this title was considered too offensive for American publication.Ĭhristie’s work is not known for its racial sensitivity, and by modern standards her oeuvre is rife with casual Orientalism. With all the controversy surrounding the renaming of problematic buildings, it seems fitting to draw attention to another bit of suspicious rebranding. By Sadie Stein FebruOur Daily Correspondent ![]()
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