My Top Ten Films of 1945

With apologies to The Body Snatcher, Lady on a Train, Murder He Says, A Royal Scandal, and Story of G.I. Joe, these are my Top Ten Films of 1945:

Strike!: 1945, Part Eight

October 1945. Now that the war's officially over, there's some tidying up to do. Remaining Japanese troops in Taiwan surrender, the Nazi Party is officially dissolved, and 29 countries come together to establish the United Nations, making Woodrow Wilson's dream a reality; throughout the year, more will join. 

In Hollywood, a six-month strike by the Set Decorators' union came to a head as a fight broke out between scabs, police, Warner Bros. security, and 300 strikers. The fallout contributed to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1946, limiting the power of labor unions, and the slow dissolution of the Conference of Studio Unions, which spearheaded the strike.

Though the strike caused delays on films like Duel in the Sun, for the most part, studios had a backlog of films to release. The month Hollywood Black Friday occurred, here's what the output looked like:

You're Doomed: Desyat Negrityat, 1987

All month long, we're celebrating the Queen of Crime as she and her works appeared on screen, with a grand finale of five Murder on the Orient Expresses the first full week of November. Today, and all this week, we're focusing on her standalone works.

My favorite Agatha Christie is And Then There Were None, and I am not alone. The best-selling novel she ever wrote, it's inspired countless spoofs (Family Guy did one), two stage plays (including one written by Christie herself), and a number of film adaptations. The plot concerns ten complete strangers summoned to a remote location, where a recording accuses each of them of having committed and gotten away with murder. One by one they start to die, and each death mirrors a verse in a poem tacked up in each of their rooms - "Ten little soldier boys went down to dine, one choked himself and then there were nine," etc. Not only that, with each death, a figurine from a set of ten is either broken or spirited away.

Yes, it's the classic slasher film premise, and it was Christie who started it all. Boy, did I have my pick of which one to do for this entry! Do I go with the classic black-and-white 1945 version directed by René Clair - not only did it use the "happy ending" Christie wrote in for the stage version, it also changed character names, crimes, identities, and levels of guilt? Maybe the groovy 1965 version with Bond Girl Shirley Eaton running about in a towel in a Swiss castle? The 1974 one with Charles Aznavour performing his real-life hit "The Old-Fashioned Way" in a hotel in Iraq? Bollywood's Gumnaam?

In the end, I went with the only film to preserve Christie's text word for word. Yes, this almost meant And Then There Were None, but that version included a lot of coke and alcohol and people being haunted by the Great War and secret lesbianism and whatnot. I'm talking about the only movie to film Agatha Christie as though they had no screenplay, just the book in everyone's hands. I'm talking about...

Desyat Negrityat (1987)

dir: Stanislav Govorukhin

Casting Coup Tuesday: And Then There Were None

And Then There Were None is one of Agatha Christie's most famous works -- I reckon Murder on the Orient Express and Witness for the Prosecution are the only other ones as immediately recognizable. It has been the basis for two stage plays, a mini-series, multiple films, and infinite spoof episodes on television (even Family Guy did a season premiere called "And Then There Were Fewer").

The 1945 film version

The plot: ten strangers are invited to an island by a mysterious U.N. Owen. A recording is played during dinner, accusing each of them of various crimes. Then they start dropping off one by one, their deaths aligning with a nursery rhyme called...well that depends on the latest publication. Current editions have it as "Ten Little Soldier Boys" ... for years it was "Ten Little Indians" ... first editions have it as "Ten Little N---ers", and that was quickly amended.

There are three famous film versions, all of which take their queue from Agatha's own stage adaptation. The 1945 version features an all-star cast that includes Academy Award Winners Barry Fitzgerald and Walter Huston, and Academy Award Nominees Mischa Auer, Roland Young and Judith Anderson. It adheres closely to the original work -- they're all English, they're on an island. The next two films would not.

The 1974 film version

In 1965, things got groovy and international. The new ensemble of ten came from everywhere -- a Bond Girl, an American pop star, an Israeli beauty queen -- but still a majority English, all gathered in a castle atop the Swiss Alps. The same producers remade the picture, practically word-for-word, in 1974, moving to a hotel in Iraq! The ensemble comes from Italy, Germany (2), Austria, France (2), the United Kingdom (3), Argentina.

The 2015 BBC version

Last year, the BBC presented a three-part mini-series that brought things back to the art deco island. It, too, was a starry cast that included Toby Stephens and Charles Dance, and focused much more on the effects of war. But frankly, I've always liked the idea of an international who's who getting bumped off one by one. And so I've used that approach when casting my own Ten Little...People.

After the jump...