Teresa Reviews “And Then There Were None” (2017)

Teresa reviews “And Then There Were None” (2017) (a.k.a. Soshite daremo inakunatta), the Japanese TV version, and thought it even Christie would be pleased with the production.

(Found in four parts at Dailymotion as of November 2022: Four-Part Playlist)

Fidelity to text: 4½ guns, poison, hatchets, etc.

A police procedural bookends the film and the spinster becomes an actress in contemporary Japan.

Quality of film on its own: 4½ weapons.

Only because our copy was terrible. Beautifully acted, paced, shot. Terror mounts on the island as the victims are picked off, one by one.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

I really wish TV Asahi, who produced this film, would release their Agatha Christie adaptations to the wider world, either via streaming services or on DVD. They are that good. Agatha’s fans deserve to see really well-made versions of her novels. I can’t imagine a business leaving money on the table, but here we are.

I’m sticking with the novel’s character names to make it easier.

Like The Great Actress Murder Case (a.k.a. The Mirror Crack’d, 2018), this stars Ikki Sawamura as Detective Inspector Ryuya Shokokuji, head of Criminal Investigative Unit #1 in Tokyo. He gets the baffling cases.

The novel, in case you don’t remember, ends with two epilogs. The first shows the assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard and Inspector Maine discussing the case. They’re baffled by ten bodies, no motives, and no sign of the neat killer who tidied up the site. They’ve done background checks on the victims and discovered the recording was correct. Each victim had been involved with a suspicious death but got away with it. The man who’d made the arrangements for the island party, Mr. Morris, was well-known to the police for skirting the law. Conveniently dead of a sleeping pill overdose, he was unavailable for questioning. Diaries and journals let the police build up a timeline.

The second epilog was a message in a bottle, found by a fishing trawler. It was Justice Wargrave’s confession and explanation.

Until Justice Wargrave’s confession is revealed, the reader knows more details about the deaths and why the victims deserved it than the police, but only the most astute reader will realize who dunnit. The victims never learn who set them up until the moment of death and frequently, not even then.

The adaptations play around with this. Most of them are based on the stage play, so the audience sees the judge seduce the doctor into helping him find the murderer and then betray him. The audience also sees Vera discover that the judge was the evil mastermind.

Not here. The judge, like in the novel, is one more victim and if you don’t know the story, you’ll be as shocked as anyone else when the truth is revealed. Vera shoots Philip Lombard several times (quadruple-tap!), then staggers into the house, hallucinating all the way. She’s remembering how she sent Cyril to his watery grave because she wanted her lover to inherit Cyril’s money. Her guilt is overwhelming. In her room, the noose awaits her. Just like in the novel, Vera hangs herself and kicks away the chair. Unlike every other version we’ve seen, there’s no confrontation with the judge.

There are changes. Tony Marsden becomes an amateur boxer who, while drunk one night, intervenes in a mugging and accidentally murders someone. General Maxwell is now a senior member of the Japanese parliament. He sends his wife’s lover into a terrorist attack he’d been told might happen. Actually, this makes him more guilty than otherwise because other people died in that terrorist attack; people who could have been saved if he’d alerted the police. Spinster Emily Brent becomes a famous actress (which we’ve seen before). She forces her young, pretty housekeeper to have an abortion. There’s a hint of something more in their relationship ala Brenda Vaccaro’s 1989 performance, but only a hint. Dr. Armstrong becomes female, perfectly plausible in modern Japan. She also stopped drinking as a result of that patient dying and worked hard to redeem herself as a doctor. That didn’t save her.

Blore, the detective, and Philip Lombard, the mercenary, have more interesting changes that add nuance to their crimes.

Blore lies in open court to the judge about a defendant’s crimes. But it’s not for monetary gain or to cover up his own criminal behavior. It’s to get an abusive man in jail so he can’t finish beating his wife to death.

Lombard is shown fighting with his men in a war zone. It’s unclear how official they are so they could be mercenaries. During the fighting, his teenage daughter by a local woman (so he’s been there, on and off, for quite a while) drives up in a jeep to rescue dad from certain death. Save daughter? Die with his men? That’s a more difficult choice than abandoning native troops in the jungle. He’s also older than in other versions and no longer has any romantic interludes with Vera.

Vera’s still Vera. Pretty and willing to murder a child to get what she wants.

The police procedural bookends the episodes and shows how Inspector Shokokuji, as brilliant and observant as Sherlock Holmes, sees clues everyone else misses. It’s clear to him that the mastermind behind the crime is like masterminds everywhere. He wants to be recognized for his genius and applauded for his masterpiece. Except that murder is never art or a game.

He even invokes Sherlock Holmes! Bill, a longtime fan of Conan Doyle, spotted the trick and explained it to me. The judge shot himself and made it look like someone murdered him by using Mrs. Gibson’s procedure from “The Problem of Thor Bridge.” Similar to that story, the judge tied a weight to the gun and tossed the weight out of his room’s second-story window. He sat down in his chair, the sheet attached to the ceiling primed to fall. When he shot himself, his hand dropped, allowing the weight to fall to the ground, taking the gun out the window with it. He used kelp for the string, knowing it would decay or be eaten. The weight was bricks, blending anonymously into the pile of bricks.

And, as a reward to the clever policeman who found it, one of the anonymous bricks contained a memory chip, like a message in a bottle tossed out to sea. The judge proves Inspector Shokokuji’s point. He wants his masterpiece to be admired and written up in journals both scholarly and popular. Why else leave hidden cameras everywhere to record the murders, one by one? Why else include a taped confession and explanation?

Remember me! You insects will remember my name forever!

Something like that.

But Inspector Shokokuji is unimpressed. The judge still murdered ten people. Don’t forget the shovel sticking out of his garden in his confession. That’s where his accomplice is buried, similar to Justice Wargrave murdering Morris in the novel.

This is an amazing adaptation. Even Sarah Phelps’ version in 2015 — otherwise very true to the text — wouldn’t pass muster with the added, gratuitous nudity and drug orgy. But this one was marred only by the poor quality of the film. That could be easily fixed by TV Asahi making it available for streaming with English subtitles. Then a huge, new audience could enjoy this stellar version of And Then There Were None. Agatha would be pleased.