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The classic whodunit film "And Then There Were None" (1945) was based on a novel by Agatha Christie published six years earlier. The premise is that eight guests and two servants are ferried to an island at the invitation of a mysterious stranger. There's no way off the island, and the ferry won't return for several days. When it becomes clear that there's a murderer bent on picking them off one by one, the survivors struggle to identify the killer in their ranks.
A prolific writer whom some have called "The Queen of Crime," Agatha Christie penned more than 80 detective stories, several plays (including the long-running "Mousetrap") and, under the pseudonym "Mary Westmacott," a number of romances. She is best remembered, however, for creating two of the world's best-loved fictional detectives, Miss Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot.
Screen adaptations of Christie's stories abound, including several of "And Then There Were None." The version aired by UEN SciFi Friday was directed by French-born Rene Clair, whose career straddled the divide between the Age of the Silver Screen when silent films ruled and the Golden Age of Hollywood. It's fitting perhaps, as Christie dominated the mystery writing scene during a roughly synchronous timespan that literary circles dubbed "The Golden Age of Detective Fiction"—the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties—when Christie and fellow crime novelists Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, and others were household names.
