Ten Little Indians

Ten people are invited to a mountain hotel reachable only by cable car. The host is nowhere to be found and in his place a recording accuses each of them of a death they covered up. Then the guests start dying in turn, and as the number falls the survivors turn on one another. George Pollock adapted Agatha Christie's novel and moved the setting from an island to the Alps, where snow and the cable car close off escape as absolutely as water did. Its most remembered feature is a piece of showmanship: just before the killer is named the image stops and the audience is given a sixty-second countdown to guess. The film is black and white and the pacing is classical. Who it is for: viewers who like closed-room murder puzzles and Christie adaptations. Who it is not for: readers of the novel, since the film parts from the book at the end.