There is nothing I find more tiresome than all the bleating about why doesn't this or all the films of this story use the depressing ending. The fact that ending simply would not have WORKED for films of this era seems to escape everyone's attention. Plus, this film does not give us Christie's stage ending version but a more intelligent take of Lombard not being the real Lombard (which is better than the cop-out explanation of Lombard's innocence in the stage version) and in this film which is an outstandingly wicked dark comedy thanks to some brilliant performances and a great script by Dudley Nichols (who doesn't get enough credit) that knows when to drop the moments of humor in that blend well with Christie's prose. View the film on those terms, please and cease this whining of "I want everyone to be dead!". You got that vision in two other projects and frankly those efforts pale before this one (I don't want the version I see to have Blore guilty of beating up a gay prisoner or for the general to shoot dead his wife's lover in cold blood).

Don't forget: Christie adapted the story for the stage during World War II, when London was getting the crap bombed out of it by the Germans pretty much on a nightly basis. She felt, and I agree, that the last thing her audiences needed was a downbeat ending.

I watched this movie not knowing about the stage ending and thinking it was going to have the book's ending.
Boy, was I ever shocked when the movie got to the end. I couldn't believe they'd ruined that fantastic ending by leaving two people alive and blamed Hollywood. I didn't realize at the time that it was Christie I should have been blaming.

I did not care for the movie ending either.

The only ending of this story which I accept is the book's ending.
~~
JimHutton (1934-79) and ElleryQueen

Same way it did in the four English-language feature films: Vera finds the Judge waiting for her, and he gives her a very condensed version of what happenshe doesn't go into detail about buying the island or how he found out about the unpunished crimes.

The recent stage adaptation uses the novel's ending
How did the stage adaptation get around the fact that the book's ending is a lengthy postscript that explains what happened? That could hardly be presented in a film or play without spoiling the drama.

When Christie adapted her novel for the stage she changed the ending, wisely sensing that war-time British audiences would be depressed by a stage full of corpses. The recent stage adaptation uses the novel's ending, and if it's ever filmed again I'd like to see it filmed with the novel's ending: I think today's audiences would accept it.
"I don't use a pen: I write with a goose quill dipped in venom!"
W. Lydecker

Spoiler
Another radical move would be if after the scene where the judge is found apparantly dead, we see the judge and the doctor meeting by the cliff tops at night. They discuss their plan and how faking the judge's death may rattle the murderer. And then the judge kills the doctor.
So we know who did it partway through. But it's a different way of doing it.

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Let's say you begin the film not with the eight doomed victims arriving in Devonshire but on the island itself where the detectives are walking around the house and talking about finding ten dead bodies. So right away you know that there are no survivors. But then again, everyone who watched "The Blair Witch Project" also knew all three characters were doomed. This will spark interest in the audience who wonder what could have happened. And if filmed correctly, the audience will all wonder "What the f___???" after Vera Claythorne hangs herself, and we see someone off screen slowly drag the chair away. That should set up the confession at the end which will nail the film
Eddie

When Agatha Christie adapted the story for the stage, she created the "movie" ending. Apparently there really is an alternate ending to the nursery rhyme that goes "He got married, and then there were none." That is what she based the ending on.
I do prefer the books ending, though. It would be hard to film, I guess.