The Seventh Survivor

Agatha Christie's AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (to use the polite title) was published in 1939. Although an official movie version had to wait until Rene Clair tackled it for the American market in 1945, Leslie Hiscott borrowed its basic elements for the British quota quicky.

A passenger ship is torpedoed and six survivors -- and the captain of the U-boat that sank the ship -- make it to a British lighthouse. It turns out that one of the survivors is actually a German spy -- and another is a British agent tracking them. Add to the mix the lighthouse keepers (Wally Patch and Ronald Shiner) and you have the plot, under the constraint of two hand guns which keep changing hands, a murder and a deadline: the U-boat commander radioed for the Germans to pick him up, and they will be there soon.

The cast includes the beautiful Linden Travers (best remembered for playing "Mrs. Todhunter" in Hitchcock's THE LADY VANISHES), Frank Pettingell and Felix Aylmar. Patch and Shiner are supposed to provide the comic distraction, but their dull and pompous characters don't appeal to me. Aside from them, however, it's a fine little mystery.

The scene opens with a neutral merchant ship, sailing to Lisbon. The ship is torpedoed, and six survivors escape in a lifeboat. They are rescued by the crew of a lighthouse - but amongst the survivors is a seventh survivor, a German officer from a U Boat that has also been sunk.

Amongst the others is a German spy and a British agent. But who are they?

As the suspense builds up, everyone starts to distrust each other, with the only one who they are sure of is the German officer. But who is his German contact? And who is the British agent that he must rout out and capture?

Lots of red herrings in this tense mystery which will have you all guessing right up the last two minutes.

A group of survivors in a lifeboat from a torpedoed neutral ship on its way to Portugal pick up a seventh survivor - Austin Trevor (Captain Hatzmann). He is the captain of the U-boat that is responsible for the sinking of the ship and he guides them to a lighthouse from which he intends to escape back to the Fatherland. The story unfolds at the lighthouse as we wait for help to arrive and take Trevor away to safety. However, amongst the stranded passengers are a British agent and a Nazi spy as well as a couple of tricksters. Who is who.....?

The film is a mystery as we try to guess who the British agent is and who the Nazi spy is. It keeps us guessing and despite the limited cast, it does a very good job of concealing the truth. You won't guess the outcome. There are also amusing sections of dialogue that you should enjoy, eg, Ronald Shiner (Ernie) and his use of the term "dago" and Austin Trevor's rather frank announcement that he hates the Dutch. It's quality stuff.

The usual suspects go through the motions in this slick, talky potboiler from early in the war that initially anticipates Hitchcock's 'Lifeboat'; complete with the captain of the German sub that fired the torpedo in the first place joining the survivors.

Where it differs from Hitchcock's film a couple of years later is that a monocled Austin Trevor wholly lacks the sly charm, resourcefulness and apparently the duplicity of Walter Slezak in the later film; and the action swiftly transfers to a nearby lighthouse (rather than in the big country house that would have provided the backdrop during the thirties). The audience is exercised not by what Trevor is up to, but in figuring out the identity of his partner in crime among the survivors (as we are told almost immediately by Whitehall mandarin Felix Aylmer), which even Trevor doesn't know.

Ambivalence is supplied by the fact that the German agent theirself might not be too well disposed to the man who torpedoed the ship fully aware that he - or she - were aboard. I didn't really care when the agent turned out to be one of the two candidates I nominated at the outset; but there are a couple of genuine surprises along the way.