The Novel

The original title of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None was Ten Little Niggers.  Apparently, there was nothing thought to be problematic about that title when the book was first published in England in 1939, but by 1940, the title was changed for American editions to And Then There Were None, the last line of the nursery rhyme to which the original title referred.

Now, it was easy enough to change the title of the book, but there remained the problem of that nursery rhyme, which plays an essential role in the story, wherein each of the “ten little niggers” is killed off one by one.  For that purpose, the word “Indian” was substituted.  That worked out so well that some reprints in America use the title Ten Little Indians.  Both substitutes for the original title can also be found for the titles of the movies that have adapted this story.

However, the British were comfortable with the original title, and so it was used in the United Kingdom until 1985.  Because Agatha Christie was herself British, and because the British often used the word “niggers” to refer to the dark-skinned people of India, that led me to wonder if the word “Indians” was recommended as a substitute with the people of India in mind.  Over here in America, we didn’t readily make that association, so we imagined it was American Indians being referred to. But I’m just guessing.

However, the word “Indian” is no longer politically correct when referring to the indigenous people of America, so the title might have become Ten Little Native Americans, except for two problems:  first, the word “little” is somewhat demeaning when used to refer to any ethnic group; second, it wouldn’t work for the poem, the meter being all wrong, as in “Ten little Native Americans went out to dine.” For that matter, “Ten little African Americans went out to dine” wouldn’t work either.  And so it is that the term “soldier boys” made its way into later editions.  However, Ten Little Soldier Boys sounds silly, so the title And Then There Were None was resurrected.  The words “little” and “boys” seems to be acceptable when connected with soldiers, but Ten Little Black Boys would not have been a good way to update the original title.  The story takes place on an island, and the name of that island underwent corresponding changes for similar reasons. Sanitizing a novel is not easy.  In discussing the novel and its adaptations generally, I shall use the word “Indian.”

But there is still more work to be done, and that concerns the antisemitism in the novel.  Philip Lombard, a soldier of fortune, refers to Morris, the man who talked him into going to Indian Island, as a “little Jew” or a “Jew boy.”  Christie herself refers to the “thick Semitic lips of Mr. Morris.”  It is my understanding, however, that many of her novels are presently being sanitized to eliminate the antisemitism as well.

The basic story in the novel is as follows.  Ten people have (supposedly) been invited to Indian Island under false pretenses by a Mr. U.N. Owen.  In each person’s room, hanging on the wall, there is a copy of “Ten Little Indians.”  On a table in the dining room, there are ten figurines representing the ten Indians. On a record that is played for them, which has the title “Swan Song,” they are all accused of murder. One by one, each person is (supposedly) killed as punishment for his or her crime and in a manner corresponding to the poem.  Along the way, they realize that “Mr. U.N. Owen” stands for “Mr. Unknown.” As each person is executed, one of the figurines disappears.

Of special interest are Philip Lombard and Vera Claythorne.  Lombard was a mercenary who abandoned twenty-one natives in East Africa, leaving them without food, resulting in their deaths. As for Vera, she drowned Cyril, a child that was in her care as governess, so that Hugo, the man she loved, would inherit his aunt’s fortune rather than Cyril.  Hugo had told Vera that he could not afford to marry her because he hadn’t a penny to his name.  (Presumably, it was out of the question that he should go out and get himself a job.)  But, he continued, if only Cyril had been born a girl, he would inherit his aunt’s fortune instead.  (It’s that strange British law about inheritance again, like the one we encountered in Pride and Prejudice.)  Had that happened, Hugo says, he and Vera would have been able to marry.  But after Vera allows Cyril to drown, Hugo suspects her of murder and wants nothing to do with her.  Some readers believe that Hugo was hinting to Vera that he wanted Cyril to die, but once she allowed the boy to drown, Hugo didn’t need her anymore.

Eventually, Lombard and Vera conclude that the so-called Mr. Owen must be Dr. Armstrong, the only one left alive besides the two of them, or so they think. When they discover Armstrong’s body lying dead on the beach, Vera decides that Lombard must be Mr. Owen, and she shoots him with his own revolver. When she returns to the house, she sees a noose waiting for her, suspended from the ceiling. She is so depressed and guilt-ridden that she sticks her head in it and hangs herself.

A man eventually shows up at the island on account of some S.O.S signals that had been sent, and he discovers that all ten people are dead.  Some of those people kept a diary or made notes of the events that took place, but Scotland Yard cannot figure out what happened.  One day, a bottle floating in the sea is picked up by a fishing trawler.  It has the solution to the mystery enclosed within, written by Judge Wargrave, one of the guests on the island. He admits to killing the other nine guests, while faking his own death along the way with the assistance of Dr. Armstrong, whom he fooled into trusting him.  In fact, he also faked his own guilt, for the man he sentenced to death was guilty and deserving of such punishment.  Wargrave’s motive was to see to it that the other nine people got the punishment they deserved, whose secrets he had been slowly learning about over the years. Then, after the other nine had all been killed, he committed suicide in a way that made it appear that he had been murdered too.  He had already been advised by a doctor that he did not have long to live, and rather than suffer a slow and protracted death, he decided to go out in a “blaze of excitement,” and in so doing, to express himself as an artist of crime.

Of course, the person really who really was the artist of crime was Agatha Christie herself.  There have been more adaptations of this novel than any other she had written, and possibly more than any than that of any mystery written by any author.  The paradox regarding its popularity lies in the fact that the whole thing is preposterous.  That all these people could be brought together in the same place and at the same time is enough of a stretch.  That being done, Judge Wargrave had to kill each one of them without anyone else seeing him do it, in the manner dictated by the poem, and in the proper order.  Finally, he had to fake his suicide to make it look like he had been murdered by whoever Mr. Owen was.

So, why is this story so popular?  Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “icebox scene” to refer to any scene in a movie that does not make sense but will not be noticed by someone watching the movie until much later, after he has left the theater, returned home, and is getting something to eat out of the icebox before going to bed.  However, by then it doesn’t matter because he has already enjoyed the movie.  This novel by Agatha Christie doesn’t merely have an icebox scene. Rather, the entire story is one big icebox scene.  By the time we realize that no one could possibly arrange things in the novel the way Judge Wargrave did, it is too late.  We have already enjoyed it.

The Adaptations

With all the adaptations that have been made of this novel, we naturally expect them to differ from one another in a variety of ways, most of them minor.  There is one major difference, however. First, there are the adaptations that follow the story in the novel.  Second, there are the adaptations in which Lombard and Vera are innocent of the crimes charged against them and are still alive at the end. Judge Wargrave realizes this right after drinking some poison, and he dies knowing that he has been foiled. Lombard and Vera are a heterosexual couple that have formed a romantic relationship and thus satisfy the common formula for a happy ending.  Both alternative endings have appeared in plays, but I’ll stick with the movies.

The Happy-Ending Adaptations

While there are many happy-ending adaptations, I shall limit myself to just two, the best of the lot, the others being inferior and derivative.

1945.  The first adaptation is And There Were None, produced in 1945.  The tone is lighthearted, as one can immediately tell from the background music. There is a lot of silliness, including some regrettable drunk humor.  In keeping with all this, it is not surprising that Barry Fitzgerald plays the role of Judge Wargrave, for he tends to play cute.  Actually, someone decided to give this character a different name in this movie just because he could, but I’ll refer to him by his book name.

In this movie, Judge Wargrave is actually guilty of what was charged against him on the record:  he knowingly sentenced an innocent man to death. Instead, it is Lombard and Vera who are innocent. Actually, the so-called Lombard is Charles Morley (Louis Hayward).  The real Lombard was so guilt-ridden over what he had done that it drove him to suicide.  Morley decided to accept the invitation to Indian Island, pretending to be Lombard, in order to find out why his friend had killed himself.  As for Vera, she is accused of killing her sister’s fiancé.  However, it is her sister that killed him, and Vera merely covered up for her, taking care of her until she died.

1965.  The 1965 adaptation uses the title Ten Little Indians.  A lot of the names were changed in this one, and there are some generic changes as well:  the elderly, pious spinster, Emily Brent, has been replaced by an actress; the real Lombard was an engineer.  Lombard is no longer said to be guilty of the deaths of twenty-one men, but only of a woman he got pregnant.  We gather he talked her into getting an abortion, which was botched.  Since the man presenting himself as Lombard will turn out to be the innocent Charles Morley (Hugh O’Brian), the diminishment of the crime would seem unnecessary.  The secretary, who was Vera in the novel, but now is Ann, played by Shirley Eaton, was falsely accused of having killed her sister’s fiancé, as in the 1945 version, except that her sister is now in a mental home.  As with Lombard, there would seem to be no need to change her crime from that of allowing a child to drown since she will turn out to be innocent anyway.  Because the movie will have a happy ending, where Morley and Ann (a.k.a. Vera) will be the innocent, heterosexual couple that survives, perhaps it was thought better not to let the crimes of which these two guests had been accused be too dark and disturbing, lest the taint of the accusations linger on.

The Everyone-Dies Adaptations

I have been able to see only two adaptations in which everyone dies in the end, just as in the book, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were more out there somewhere.

1987.  The original title of the 1987 Russian version, translated into English as Ten Little Indians, was Desyat negrityat.  In the subtitles, the characters refer to Indian Island and to the poem “Ten Little Indians,” but I wonder.  My knowledge of the Russian language is minimal, but I believe that “negrityat” means “little blacks.”  Furthermore, the statuettes on the table have the clothing, color, and physiognomy of African natives.  Moreover, Lombard’s antisemitism is also in this version.

This inclusion of racism and antisemitism makes sense if the intention was for this to be the most faithful adaptation of them all, even if that was undone when modified for an English-speaking audience.  And it is a faithful adaptation, except for one little thing.  In the novel, there is no sexual or romantic relationship between Lombard and Vera.  In this movie, he rapes her.  But I guess it must have been pretty good sex because she spends the rest of the night with him.

2015.  A television miniseries was made in 2015, using the title And Then There Were None.  This adaptation is moody and atmospheric:  the skies are perpetually overcast; the interior of the house is always dark.  So dark, in fact, that I kept wishing someone would turn on the lights.

I read somewhere that Agatha Christie tried to make the characters in her book guilty of crimes that those in the audience might imagine themselves to have committed, given the right circumstances; or, failing that, crimes that one can imagine being tempted to commit, while still having sufficient moral character to resist.  Unfortunately, I cannot find that quotation by Christie.

In the happy-ending adaptations, the crimes were sometimes lessened, making it even easier for us to identify with those who were accused.  The modifications of the crimes Lombard and Vera were accused of in the 1965 movie have already been noted.  As another example from that movie, Emily Brent was replaced by Ilona Bergen, and her crime was telling her husband that he meant nothing to her and that she was leaving him, after which he committed suicide.

In this 2015 television miniseries, however, either the crimes are made much worse, or the characters are made unlikeable, in either case to the point that we are not likely to identify with them.  Anthony Marston, the irresponsible playboy, snorts cocaine, and when someone in a movie does that, we are supposed to despise him.  Dr. Armstrong, the alcoholic surgeon who butchered a patient, and William Blore, the private detective, help themselves to what was left of Marston’s cocaine later in the movie, so they are also worthy of our contempt.

In addition, Blore is a homophobe, using words like “degenerate” and “pansy” to refer to the homosexual he murdered by stomping him to death.  His doing so was an expression of self-hatred, since he had been caught and sent to prison for homosexuality himself.  (In the novel, Blore got an innocent man convicted by giving perjured evidence.)  Rogers, the butler, smothered Jennifer Brady, a woman he and his wife were taking care of, with a pillow.  (In the novel, Rogers and his wife simply withheld the medication that she needed.) General MacArthur shoots his wife’s lover in the back.  (In the novel, he ordered the man on a dangerous mission, where he was likely to be killed.) Emily Brent, the elderly, pious spinster, is a lesbian pedophile.  She made advances to an adolescent girl, a foundling she had adopted. When spurned by the girl, Brent abandoned her, and the girl committed suicide.  (In the novel, Brent dismissed her maid because she was pregnant out of wedlock.) This Emily Brent is also an antisemite, who says the Jews are probably responsible for their situation on the island.

In other words, these characters in the novel were all guilty of someone’s death, but their crimes were presented in a such a way that we were still able to identify with them, at least to some degree, making us care about what happened to them. This 2015 adaptation, on the other hand, makes the characters so detestable as to preclude even the slightest amount of sympathy.  As a result, we don’t care about the danger they are in.

The setting of Rear Window is an apartment complex that surrounds a courtyard, located in Greenwich Village, and taking place in the year this movie was made, which was 1954.  As the movie opens, we are given a look at the part of the apartment complex that can be seen through the window of one of those units, which turns out to be occupied by L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart). He is still asleep, with his face and neck wet with perspiration.  His thermometer says it is ninety-four degrees.  At the time this movie was made, air conditioners were not as prevalent as they are now, so it is no surprise that these apartments lack that amenity.  It is for this reason that Jeff’s window is open with the shades up.  More importantly, it also explains why the windows of the apartments across the way are also open with the shades or blinds up.

As the camera surveys the room, we can see that Jeff is a photographer, one who travels to places where there is danger in order to get thrilling pictures for the magazine that employs him, many of which are framed.  One of those is a picture of an accident involving racecars, which he supposedly took while standing in the middle of the racetrack.  Of course, a photographer standing the middle of a racetrack might be just the sort of thing that would cause an accident like that.  Anyway, it was in getting that picture that his left leg was broken.  It has been in a cast for six weeks.

One thing we do not see as we get to look around his room is a television.  By 1954, televisions were becoming quite common, but I guess he just hasn’t gotten around to buying one.  As a result, he has been forced to keep himself amused by watching the goings-on of those in the other apartments.

This movie is based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, “It Had to Be Murder.”  As this was published in 1942, it would certainly be no surprise if Jeff, who is the narrator in that story, had no television.  And yet, he says that watching what is going on in other houses or apartments is like watching television, so maybe he had one in the original story.

In any event, it is an apt simile.  I have heard of men who own several televisions so that they can watch four football games at once, but in Jeff’s case, it is more like having several televisions that allow him to watch a bunch of soap operas all at once. These “soap operas” show the various stages of love and marriage, which are especially relevant to Jeff as he struggles against the threat of marriage in his own life:

Miss Torso:  Directly across the way, in what appears to be a house adjacent to the apartments, there is a beautiful woman whom Jeff calls Miss Torso.  She is a ballet dancer, who exercises and stretches in front of her open window while music plays on her radio.  She has several sexually aggressive suitors, one of whom she has to struggle to get rid of at the end of a date one night.

The Songwriter:  At right angles to Jeff’s apartment is a man who writes melodies.  He is working on his latest composition but is having trouble because of the radio Miss Torso is playing while she dances around in her apartment.  However, even when her radio is off, he has trouble of some sort, coming home drunk one night, knocking the sheets of music off his piano in disgust.  Jeff speculates that he probably lives alone because he had an unhappy marriage.

Miss Hearing Aid:  Right below Miss Torso is a woman that an online script refers to as Miss Hearing Aid, even though Jeff does not so refer to her himself.  The script says she is in her late sixties.  The word “Miss” tells us she is what would then have been referred to as an old maid.  She too is bothered by Miss Torso’s radio, but she has the advantage of being able to turn off her hearing aid.

The Newlyweds:  Off to the left is a recently married couple who are just moving in.  When we first see them, Miss Torso’s radio is playing “That’s Amore.”  The wife is oversexed, continually putting demands on her husband to come back to bed for another round of lovemaking.  It would be another couple of years before the magazine Confidential would report that Frank Sinatra’s secret for having sex with so many starlets was eating Wheaties, so this husband is having to struggle to perform without the benefit of that information.

The Married Couple on the Fire Escape:  Next there is a married couple of many years, the kind that will continue to be married for many years to come.  They live on the third floor.  Because it is so hot, they pull a mattress onto the fire escape so they can sleep out there, in hopes of getting a cool breeze.  They appear old enough to have had children that are now adults and have families of their own, but they have no young children living with them at this time.  In fact, there are no children in any of these “soap operas.”  Perhaps as a child substitute, they have a small dog for a pet, which they lower in a basket down two floors so he can do his business and then get back in the basket.

Miss Lonelyhearts:  Moving on to another stage of love and marriage is a woman Jeff calls Miss Lonelyhearts.  When first we see her, the radio is playing “To See You (Is to Love You),” which is sung by a lonely man who only dreams of having a woman to love.  She is played by Judith Evelyn, an actress who would have been about fifty-five years old at the time this movie was made. She acts out a fantasy of entertaining a man for dinner before putting her head in her arms and crying.  She is later driven to even more desperate measures to end her loneliness.  Even though Jeff uses the word “Miss” as part of his name for her, we gather that she used to be married, but is now either a widow or a divorcee.  Had she been single all these years, she would have been able to adjust to her situation gradually as those years went by.  But when a woman has been married for thirty years and is suddenly divorced, let us say, she awakens like Rip Van Winkle to an unfamiliar world, ill prepared to cope with being alone again.

The Salesman and His Sick Wife:  And now we reach the final stage of love and marriage, where a man gets so tired of his nagging wife that he murders her so he can run off with another woman.

And so, we see that marriage has its benefits and its costs.  Marriage was certainly a benefit to Jeff’s editor, Gunnison, although the marriage in question was not his own, but that of his boss.  When Jeff asks him how he got to be such a big editor, he replies, “Thrift, industry, and hard work…, and catching the publisher with his secretary.”

The reason Gunnison has called Jeff is that he thought the cast was coming off that day, and he wanted to send his best photographer off to Kashmir where a revolution is about to break out.  Jeff wants to go anyway, but Gunnison refuses, now that he knows the cast will be on for another week. Jeff says if Gunnison doesn’t pull him out of this “swamp of boredom,” with nothing to do but look at the neighbors, he’ll do something drastic like get married.  “Then I’ll never be able to go anywhere,” he says.

“It’s about time you got married,” Gunnison replies, “before you turn into a lonesome and bitter old man.”

“Yeah,” Jeff says, “can’t you just see me?  Rushing home to a hot apartment to listen to the automatic laundry, and the electric dishwasher, and the garbage disposal, and the nagging wife.”  Gunnison says wives don’t nag any more, they discuss.  Jeff says that in his neighborhood, they still nag.  As he says this, he is watching the costume-jewelry salesman arriving home.  As we later find out, his name is Lars Thorwald, and he is played by Raymond Burr.  His wife is an invalid.  He goes into the bedroom, and she starts arguing with him about something, but we can’t quite hear what.

The principal spokesman for the blessings of matrimony is Jeff’s insurance nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), who comes by daily to fix him something to eat, give him a massage, and make sure he is in good health. She probably also gives him a sponge bath, but of course we don’t see that.  As she comes in through the door of Jeff’s apartment, she sees him watching his neighbors and snidely remarks that the New York State sentence for being a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse. But she doesn’t know the half of it.  Before she came in, while Jeff was talking to Gunnison, we saw two young women in their pajamas walk out onto the roof.  There is a little wall surrounding the roof, about two feet high, so Jeff cannot quite see them when they lie down.  What he can see is the pajamas they drape over that wall after having removed them, allowing them to sunbathe in the nude.   However, the helicopter pilot who hovers over them gets a full, unobstructed view.

At least, we assume they are completely naked, allowing us to be Peeping Toms too, if only in our imagination.  But Stella sanitizes our imagination when she refers to the women as the Bikini Bombshells.  Women don’t wear bikinis under their pajamas, so this was probably to satisfy the requirements of the Production Code, which not only had restrictions on what could be seen on film, but also what was implied.

Stella and Jeff get to talking about his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), who wants Jeff to marry her. But Jeff doesn’t want to get married.  Stella asks if they had a fight.  Then she asks if her father is loading up the shotgun, implying that she might be pregnant, which would mean that she and Jeff have been having sex.  Jeff is shocked that she would even suggest such a thing.  Of course, in those days, a gentleman would be expected to act shocked at such a suggestion in order to protect the lady’s honor. But his reaction seems sincere.

The point, then, is that back in the day when premarital sex was not the commonplace it is now, a man with a girlfriend that looked like Grace Kelly would need all his willpower to remain single.  The problem for Jeff is that Lisa is too high class, a fashion model who loves wearing beautiful clothes, eating at expensive restaurants, and gossiping about the latest scandal.  Jeff says he can’t imagine her “tramping around the world with a camera bum who never has more than a week’s salary in the bank.”

Now, wait a minute!  Jeff, who is supposedly Gunnison’s best photographer, is a bachelor, living in a small apartment in Greenwich Village without air conditioning, and yet he’s living paycheck to paycheck? What’s he spending it on?  This can’t be it!

Anyway, Jeff tries to argue that marriage can be approached intelligently and rationally, while Stella brushes that aside as nonsense, saying people ought to get married simply because they’re in love.  On another day, when Jeff refers to Miss Torso as the “eat, drink, and be merry” type, Stella says, “You keep your mind off her,” because she’ll probably end up “fat, alcoholic, and miserable.”  In other words, even if Jeff were to fall in love with Miss Torso, it would not be intelligent and rational for him to marry someone like her.  Stella’s inconsistency in this matter would seem to be driven by whatever conclusion she wants to reach.

A further inconsistency in Stella’s reasoning is that Lisa is also the “eat, drink, and be merry” type, the only difference being that Miss Torso is working class, whereas Lisa is high society, eating fancy food, drinking fine wines, and having Park Avenue fun doing it. Consequently, if Jeff were to marry Lisa, she might also become fat, alcoholic, and miserable.

When the conversation turns to Miss Lonelyhearts, Stella says that maybe one day she’ll find her happiness.  “Yeah,” Jeff replies, “and some man will lose his.”  This remark, along with others we have heard him make, tells us that Jeff’s aversion to marriage is not specific to Lisa, but rather represents his attitude toward marriage in general.  When he says marriage can be approached “intelligently and rationally,” he means that the intelligent and rational thing to do is not get married at all.

That evening, when Lisa arrives at Jeff’s apartment, she talks about her day, and we see that her lifestyle is even more extravagant than Jeff was able to describe to Stella.  She wants him to give up his job at the magazine and become a fashion photographer.  He is revolted by the idea. Saddened by his rejection, Lisa starts getting out the dinner she ordered from the 21 Club.  It is while she does so that Jeff watches Miss Lonelyhearts acting out her dinner with her imaginary lover.

Then he notices the apartment of the salesman.  The man brings his wife dinner, and all she has to say is, “I hope they’re cooked this time.”  He gives her a flower from his garden downstairs.  He fixes her pillow and kisses her on the head.  She flings the flower away from her with disgust.  He really cares about his flower garden, and we can see, when he picks up the flower she has discarded, that she has hurt his feelings.

That made me feel a little sorry for him when I watched this movie again recently.  The first time I saw this movie, it was just a murder mystery, one in which Jeff slowly figures out that Thorwald murdered his wife, chopped up her body in the bathtub, and then used his suitcase to take her various body parts to the East River and dump them there.  Then he got the woman he was having an affair with to pretend to be his wife, Anna Thorwald, so she could supposedly be seen leaving his apartment, as if going on a trip of some sort. This other woman then went to Merritsville, where she pretended to be Anna Thorwald and claimed the trunk with Anna’s clothes in it when it was delivered there.  I assumed it was a premeditated, deliberate murder.

Had I read Woolrich’s “It Had to Be Murder,” that would have only strengthened my assumption that the murder was carefully planned in advance.  In that short story, Jeff managed to figure out quite a bit from where he was, to an extent that bordered on clairvoyance.  He concluded that Thorwald had taken out as much life insurance as he could afford on his wife, and then slowly started poisoning her, which was making her ill.  But one night, she caught on, and he had to strangle her.  Repairs were being done on the floor above, in which cement had been poured to make the kitchen floor raised above the living room, so Thorwald stuffed his wife’s corpse into the cement and then smoothed it over.  This having been done, Jeff concluded that Thorwald’s plan was to leave some of Anna’s clothes beside a deep body of water and fake her suicide note, after which Thorwald and the other woman would be able to collect from the insurance company.  Apparently, Woolrich did not realize that insurance companies don’t pay off when the insured person commits suicide.

But none of these psychic conclusions about slow poisoning, an insurance policy, and a faked suicide note are in the movie.  It seems more likely that the browbeaten Thorwald became so tired of his wife’s nagging that he struck her in a moment of anger one night, killing her.  Then he gets the woman he was having an affair with to help him cover it up.

Of course, my sympathy for Thorwald was undoubtedly conditioned by my being much more aware of the theme of marriage in this movie, and in particular, how Jeff has a negative view of marriage in general and despairs at the thought of marrying Lisa.  The first time I saw this movie, I barely paid attention to these things.

Later in the movie, when Thorwald realizes that Jeff has been watching him and knows he killed Anna, he goes over to Jeff’s apartment to kill him too.  And yet, even so, he comes across as pathetic when he enters Jeff’s apartment and asks, “What do you want from me?  Your friend, the girl, could have turned me in.  Why didn’t she?  What is it you want?  A lot of money?  I don’t have any money.”

At one time, he and Anna loved each other very much, and so they married, fully believing in the vows they made, including, “in sickness and in health.” But sick she did become, souring her on life and taking it out on her husband, driving him to seek love elsewhere while he continued to take care of her, until one night he hit her in anger and killed her.  His attempt to kill Jeff is more out of frustration than any coldblooded attempt to conceal his crime, for Jeff’s murder would only confirm the evidence the police already had by that time regarding Anna.  At least, that’s how I imagine all this came to be, but I’m not psychic like the Jeff in Woolrich’s short story.

Now, let’s see.  Where was I?  Oh, yeah!  After Jeff and Lisa have the dinner that she had delivered from the 21 Club, they start arguing about marriage. Jeff says that he could never be a fashion photographer, and, presuming to speak for her, he says she would never be able to stand traveling around the world, living in cramped quarters, cold and hungry.  They almost break up.  He doesn’t want to lose her as a girlfriend, but she does not want to continue on as they are.  As she leaves, however, she tells him she’ll be back tomorrow.  It is later that night that Jeff sees Thorwald behaving strangely, leaving the apartment with his suitcase and returning shortly thereafter, several times that rainy night.

Lisa knows that Jeff is the kind of man who would feel obligated to marry a woman if he had sex with her, so she decides to spring that female trap on him.  A couple of nights later, she comes over with a Mark Cross overnight case containing a nightie and slippers, telling Jeff she intends to spend the night, maybe the whole weekend.

In the meantime, Jeff had called a friend of his, Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey), a police detective, in hopes that he would investigate some of the suspicious goings-on in Thorwald’s apartment.  When Tom shows up, we hear the Songwriter start playing boogie-woogie music on his piano in a minor key, acting as ominous background music, making us think that Tom is about to confirm Jeff’s suspicions. And then, just as the boogie-woogie music stops, he announces, “Thorwald is no more a murderer than I am.”  It seems that his investigation has revealed that Anna Thorwald simply went on a trip and claimed the trunk with her clothes in it.

As he explains all this, he keeps looking at the nightie and slippers in Lisa’s overnight case. Lisa thinks he is looking at the overnight case itself, wondering why he does so, and even asks Jeff later if Tom thought she stole it.  So important is it to Lisa to be fashionably attired that her chance to sport an expensive, Mark Cross accessory has made her overlook the implication of its contents.  Or maybe she is simply unconcerned about that.  From her point of view, it’s all right to have sex, just as long as you do it in style.

So, they spend the night and have that sex, although I’m not sure what sex would be like for a woman, if the man has a cast on his leg extending all the way up to his hip.  But the important thing is that this should pretty much seal the deal, as far as marriage is concerned.  It also helped that Lisa proves to be the adventuresome type herself, inasmuch as she later sneaks into Thorwald’s apartment through his window on the second floor, wearing high heels, no less, in order to try to find Anna’s wedding ring.

While all this is going on, there have been developments in the various soap operas.  The little dog that belongs to the Married Couple on the Fire Escape has had its neck broken.  It seems the dog was digging around Thorwald’s flowers.  Jeff, Lisa, and Stella are convinced that something was buried there that would incriminate Thorwald, so Stella digs around but finds nothing. What it was that had been buried there, you see, was Anna’s head in a hatbox. According to the online script, Thorwald decided to dig it up after killing the dog, and then he stuck it in his icebox for safekeeping.

This makes no sense.  If he was going to dig up the hatbox anyway, why kill the dog, unless the point is to keep people like me from feeling too sorry for Thorwald.  A man can commit murder in a movie and still have our sympathy, but if he kills a dog, that is just too heartless to be forgiven.  As for something else that does not make sense, Thorwald could easily have made one more trip with his suitcase, after putting Anna’s head in it, and then dumped her head in the East River with the rest of her body parts.  This piece of information regarding Anna’s head in a hatbox, which presumably is an allusion to Night Must Fall (1937), is put in the movie for a little comic relief.

At the end of the movie, we see that the Married Couple on the Fire Escape have gotten themselves another little dog. As for Miss Lonelyhearts, she went out one night and brought home a young man, which was a mistake, of course.  He immediately became sexually aggressive.  She slapped him and sent him on his way.  She finally decided to commit suicide by taking sleeping pills, but at the last minute, she heard the song played by the Songwriter, which soothed her savage breast.  She was able to meet him when everyone came out to see the ruckus going on in Jeff’s apartment when Thorwald tried to kill him. The Songwriter is more her own age, and at the end of the movie, she is over at his apartment.  He is pleased that she loves his music.

Earlier in the movie, Lisa also was moved by the Songwriter’s melody.  She says, “Where does a man get the inspiration for a song like that?”

Jeff replies, “From his landlord, once a month.”

That’s typical.  The man that rejects the suggestion that he get a job as a fashion photographer, where he could earn a much greater income, because he prefers the job he presently has as being meaningful and rewarding, cynically dismisses the creativity of the Songwriter, as if he could be motivated only by money.

As for Miss Torso, her boyfriend, who is a private in the army, shows up at her door.  He is dorky and shorter than she is, but she just loves him.  However, he is more interested in having something to eat out of her icebox than in making love to her.

Finally, we have the Newlyweds.  Most of the time the shade for their window has been down because they have been having sex.  Occasionally, the husband would raise the shade and look out the window, as if needing a little rest, but then lowering the shade again when he heard his wife calling him back to bed. But now the shade is up because the honeymoon is over.  The wife, who appears to be cooking, says, “I don’t care if you help me or not, but if you’d told me you quit your job, we wouldn’t have gotten married.”  The husband replies impatiently, “Oh, Honey, come on,” as he continues reading his newspaper without looking at her.

As for Jeff and Lisa, they will soon be newlyweds themselves, now that they have had sex. In the final scene, we see that Jeff has a cast on both legs, the other one having been broken when he fell off his balcony. Lisa is reading a book, Beyond the High Himalayas.  She is wearing loafers, blue jeans, and a red cotton blouse, as if she is ready to embark on a trip with Jeff as soon as he gets a new assignment. But when she sees he is asleep, she picks up a copy of Harper’s Bazaar, opens it, and begins smiling. We wonder which of them will get his or her way in the end.

The answer to that question will come the day that Lisa discovers she is pregnant.  At that point, life will become very serious.  She’ll tell Jeff that while she was happy to follow him around the world when it was just the two of them, that would be no way to raise a child, and she must return home. As for Jeff, if he has been living paycheck to paycheck in that small apartment in Greenwich Village, on what little that magazine he works for is paying him, it will be clear that he will not be able to support a wife and child on the same salary.  And so, Jeff will have to return home too and become a highly paid fashion photographer, which is what Lisa wanted all along.

You might say that Jeff should have thought of that, but as noted above, none of the soap operas featured anyone with a child, by which Jeff might have been warned of that possibility, and it would be just like a man to become oblivious to the reproductive consequences of having sex with a woman who is asking only to be enjoyed.

This review has no spoilers.  I wouldn’t dare.

The Last of Sheila is a closed-universe mystery, one in which all the suspects can be gathered together in one room, which they typically are at one point in the movie.  It is one of the best such movies ever made. I put it right up there with Mystery on the Orient Express (the 1974 version, of course) and Ten Little Indians (1965).  Of this latter movie, there have been several versions, but I think this one is the best, slightly better even than the first version, And Then There Were None (1945).

As for The Last of Sheila, this one is limited to seven people on a yacht, plus the crew. Now, I confess that with such movies, I really don’t try to solve the mystery as I watch it. Not that I would likely be successful if I did.  In the television series Ellery Queen (1975-1976), the title detective, played by Jim Hutton, would suddenly realize the solution to the mystery he was trying to solve just before the end of the show.  He would then break the fourth wall, bring our attention to several clues, after which there would be a commercial break, giving us a chance to answer the question, “Who done it?”  Even with all that, I never solved a single mystery.  But I did appreciate the fact that the show played fair, that the clues should have pointed me in the right direction.

As with most movies of this sort, we become fully aware of all the clues that have been presented to us at the dénouement.  In the case of The Last of Sheila, however, while some of the clues are indeed made explicit by the end of the movie, there are others that are not, some of which I did not notice until a second or third viewing.  And this movie is worth a second or third viewing.

My favorite clue is one that I thought was a goof.  I said to myself, “Oh no, they forgot that ….”  But they didn’t forget.  And there is another in-your-face clue that I just missed.  And, of course, there are a few red herrings.

At the beginning of the movie, Clinton (James Coburn) and his wife Sheila, who is a gossip columnist, are having a bitter argument at a party.  She becomes so angry that she leaves, deciding she will walk home. Then we see a car speeding down the road, weaving around and striking some garbage cans.  Then it hits Sheila, killing her.  The driver of the car stops, backs up, looks at the body, and then drives off.

A year passes, and we see Clinton on his yacht, which he has named “SHEILA.”  Being a game enthusiast, he has decided to host a game aboard his yacht in honor of Sheila. He invites the following people:  Tom (Richard Benjamin) and his wife Lee (Joan Hackett); Christine (Dyan Cannon); Philip (James Mason); and Alice (Raquel Welch) and her husband Anthony (Ian McShane).

Clinton is a movie producer, and everyone he has invited is connected to the movie business in some way. Tom is a screenwriter, who keeps hoping Clinton will produce a movie based on his favorite script; Lee has grown up in the film industry since she was a child; Christine is an agent; Philip is a director, presently reduced to making commercials; Alice is an actress; and Anthony is her manager. Christine refers to them all as the “B-Team,” probably including herself.  As part of the lure to get them aboard his yacht, Clinton says he intends to make a movie based on Sheila’s life, and they will all have a part in its production.  And because they are desperate to be part of a major project, they suffer his abuse, as when he refers to all of them as has-beens to their face.  As a result, a lot of them harbor ill feelings toward Clinton.

Each person is given a card with a pretend secret on it.  Each night, at a different port in the Mediterranean, they will be given a clue allowing them to find the evidence that establishes the identity of the person with that night’s secret.  Everyone who solves the mystery by finding the evidence gets a point. If the person who has the secret solves it, the game ends for the night, and those that have not yet solved it don’t score.  The better the score by the end of the week, the better billing he or she will get in the credits of the movie.  And so, on the first night, they go ashore and try to establish who is the shoplifter, which is Philip’s pretend secret.  Tom solves it, and so does Lee. When Philip solves it, that ends the game for the night.

A game like this, or perhaps one a little less elaborate, may have begun life as a party game conceived by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins.  However, in trying to devise such a game, it likely occurred to them that it could be the basis for a movie, for which they then wrote a script.

As far as the game in this movie is concerned, it sounds like a lot of fun at first.  But Alice becomes suspicious.  She had once been arrested for shoplifting, and she begins to wonder if each pretend secret is the real secret of someone else on the yacht, just as Philip’s pretend secret was Alice’s real secret.  Clinton would know about these real secrets because Sheila, being a gossip columnist, would have told him about them. Furthermore, Alice holds the homosexual card, and she knows that one of the guests on the cruise is a homosexual.  And yes, there are both clues and red herrings as to who the homosexual is.

And then something unexpected happens, bringing us to a second mystery, a real one this time, where Alice’s suspicions are confirmed and made explicit by Tom, who has had similar suspicions as to what the game was really all about.  This one involves the death of Sheila.  After much analysis, with contributions from everyone, they solve this real mystery.

Or do they?  I knew a guy once who said he got up and left the theater at this point, figuring the movie had to be over.  I had to tell him that there was a third mystery, which he might take the trouble to watch some time when he is not in so much of a hurry.

And at this point, I cannot help but express my astonishment at the not insignificant portion of the human race that will go out for what should be an enjoyable night at the movies, and then feel compelled to leave before it is over, in order to have the satisfaction of being able to drive out of the parking lot before anyone else does.  I estimate that by doing so, they manage to get home about five minutes earlier than they would have had they stayed until the movie was completely over.

I remember one night in particular.  I was watching There Was a Crooked Man (1970) at a movie theater. The movie has a twist ending:  you think it’s going to end one way, and then something completely unexpected happens, leading to a totally different ending, in which we find out that the title refers to someone other than the one we thought it did.

It was Saturday night, and the movie, which had started at 7:00, was completely over a few minutes past 9:00.  In other words, it was not likely to be way past anyone’s bedtime.  And yet, just before the movie got to that twist ending, about a third of the audience had already gotten up out of their seats and were heading for the exit.  A few went through the door, and they were undoubtedly pleased that they beat everyone else in the race to get home before 9:20 that evening.  The rest of them began to realize that the movie was really not over.  They milled around up front, shuffling slowly toward that all-important exit, heads turned to the left so they could see what was happening, but without giving up their place in line to get out the door.  One man was halfway through that exit, holding the door open with his left hand, craning his head back in to see what was going on, neither moving forward nor moving out of the way.

Anyway, for those that have the patience to wait until a movie is completely over, The Last of Sheila is a three-part mystery, the last of which is actually worth the extra time it takes to see how it unfolds.

Inasmuch as this movie is almost fifty years old, and it does not show up on your typical list of must-see movies, I figured it was worth bringing to the attention of those that might be completely unaware of its existence.

Lone Star is two-thirds of a really good movie.  Unfortunately, one-third of it is mediocre melodrama.  The two-thirds of the movie that is worth watching is set in a border town in Texas over a period of several decades told through flashbacks.  It concerns a corrupt, racist, white sheriff, Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson), who murders anyone who does not cut him in on business activities, legal or illegal.  One night, after his deputy, Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), confronts him and lets him know that his days of extorting the community are over, the sheriff disappears along with $10,000 of county funds.

Years later, some human remains are found in the desert.  The present sheriff, Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), the son of Buddy, begins investigating.  Little by little, the evidence begins to indicate that the bones are those of Sheriff Wade, that he was shot, and that the person who killed him was Buddy.  This occurs just as the town prepares for a dedication, The Buddy Deeds Memorial Courthouse, because Buddy is regarded as a hero in that town.  Sam never got along too well with his father, and so he is more than willing to let the truth come out, while Mayor Hollis Pogue, former deputy to Wade and then to Buddy, is opposed to Sam’s efforts.  Hollis does not have much respect for Sam, who he thinks will never measure up to what his father was.

Another person sponsoring the dedication is Mercedes Cruz, a respected businesswoman who runs a popular café.  She is the mother of Pilar, who used to be Sam’s friend in grade school and his girlfriend in high school.  However, Buddy did not want Sam dating her, and he kept them apart, which is a major reason Sam resents his father.  Mercedes also disapproved of Pilar and Sam going together.

As Sam continues his investigation, he finds that Sheriff Wade murdered Eladio Cruz one day because he was smuggling Mexicans across the border without giving Wade his usual bribe.  Cruz was fixing a flat tire on his truck, with the illegals in the back, when Wade and Deputy Hollis stopped on the road beside them.  Wade asks Cruz if he has a gun in his truck, and when Cruz says he has a shotgun, he tells him to get it.  When Cruz reaches for the shotgun, Wade shoots and kills him.  This way Wade can claim self-defense.  Hollis, however, knows it was murder, and he is horrified.  It later turns out that Eladio Cruz was Mercedes’ husband.  In other words, Mercedes also had a motive to kill Sheriff Wade.

A third person with a strong motive for killing Wade is a black man named Otis, who owns a bar catering to black people.  Wade used to shakedown the former owner of the bar, Roderick, and one night when Otis was a young man, who just started working for Roderick, Wade humiliated him.

It finally turns out that the night Buddy told Wade he should turn in his badge and leave town, Wade, along with Hollis, drove over to the black bar to get his usual kickback for letting Roderick stay in business.  When Wade discovered that Otis was running a poker game without giving Wade a cut, he beat Otis up.  Then he told him to hand him the revolver that Roderick kept in a cigar box, obviously intending to set him up just as he did Eladio Cruz.  But just as Buddy walked through the door, Hollis pulled out his own gun and killed Wade.  The three of them decided to cover up the killing.  They took the $10,000 in county funds and gave it to Mercedes, who had been struggling ever since her husband was murdered.  She used the money to start the café.

The night Sam learns about this from Otis and Hollis, he learns something else.  Up till then, Sam believed that the reason his father did not want him and Pilar to date was that he did not want his son dating a Mexican.  It turns out Buddy had no problem with Anglos and Mexicans crossing racial lines.  In fact, he and Mercedes were having an affair.  The problem was the opposite of miscegenation.  It was incest.  Pilar and Sam were brother and sister, at least insofar as Buddy was the father of both.  Pilar and Sam had already become lovers again by this time.  Since Pilar cannot have children anymore, they decide the incestuous nature of their relationship is not a problem and plan to marry.

That is the good two-thirds of the movie.  Unfortunately, John Sayles, who wrote and directed this movie, wanted it to be about the three races of this border town, Anglos, Mexicans, and blacks (as this movie terms them), and he wanted the three races to be represented in equal measure.  That is to say, he wanted just as much time spent on African Americans as spent on Caucasians and Latinos (as we would now term them).  This desire on Sayles’ part led him to intersperse the story described above with a story about Otis’s son, Colonel Delmore Payne, who is the commanding officer of a local army base.

In many ways, this third of the movie that concerns Colonel Payne and the army base parallels features in the main part of the story:  Payne has conflicts with his father, Otis, much as Sam had conflicts with his father, Buddy.  There is also a subplot of miscegenation, in which a white male soldier and a black female soldier talk about getting married.  But it all falls flat.  It is just routine melodrama.  Again and again, just as we are really getting into the main part of the movie, it all grinds to a halt so that the subplot surrounding Colonel Payne can be advanced.  Considering that the movie is two hours and fifteen minutes long, a version of the movie that left out this part would have been a shorter but much better movie.  This is an example of how art can be spoiled by a preconceived idea, in this case, the idea that the three races of this movie must each be given equal time, instead of allowing as much time as needed to tell a good story.