Tagged: Hugh Lombard

Ten Little Indians: Hugh O’Brian’s Three-Piece Tuxedo as Lombard

Hugh O’Brian in Ten Little Indians (1965)

Vitals

Hugh O’Brian as Hugh Lombard, romantic adventurer

Austrian Alps, Winter 1965

Film: Ten Little Indians
Release Date: September 10, 1965
Director: George Pollock
Wardrobe Credit: John McCorry

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

American movie and TV actor Hugh O’Brian was born 100 years ago today on April 19, 1925.

During World War II, the teenage Hugh Krampe followed his father’s footsteps and joined the U.S. Marine Corps, becoming the youngest drill instructor in the branch’s history. While a young recruit at Camp Pendleton, Hugh participated in a boxing match refereed by none other than John Wayne, who was shooting a film nearby. More than three decades later, the two actors’ paths would cross again when Hugh appeared in Duke’s final film, The Shootist (1976), portraying the last character that John Wayne would shoot on screen.

After his discharge from the Marines, Sgt. Krampe embarked on an acting career initially marred by misspellings. When a program incorrectly spelled his name as “Hugh Krape”, the young actor decided to avoid even more embarrassing clerical errors and took his mother’s maiden name O’Brien as his last name; when even this was misspelled as “O’Brian”, the re-christened actor shrugged and stuck with it. It was thus as Hugh O’Brian that he rose to fame portraying the title character in 229 episodes of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp on ABC, establishing himself as a strapping and charismatic leading man.

O’Brian was a substantial enough star by the mid-1960s to command the “Tony Danza treatment” when he was cast in British filmmaker Harry Alan Towers’ first of three increasingly ill-advised adaptations of Agatha Christie’s classic mystery novel And Then There Were None; Christie had named one of the ten strangers Philip Lombard, though O’Brian’s casting evidently prompted someone to rechristen the character as Hugh Lombard. Continue reading →

Oliver Reed’s Houndstooth Jacket and Turtleneck in And Then There Were None

Oliver Reed and Elke Sommer in And Then There Were None (1974)

Vitals

Oliver Reed as Hugh Lombard, adventurer and accused murderer (or is he?)

Fars, Iran, Fall 1973

Film: And Then There Were None
(also released as Ten Little Indians)
Release Date: September 24, 1974
Director: Peter Collinson

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

First released in West Germany four months earlier, the third major screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic mystery And Then There Were None arrived in the United States fifty years ago today on the last day of January 1975*. This was actually the second of three versions of the story to be produced by Harry Alan Towers, the controversial British filmmaker who was evidently quite obsessed with making his mark on Christie’s famous story each decade. (For those who may be unfamiliar, the story centers around ten strangers summoned to a secluded island house, where a mysterious recording accuses them of getting away with murder in the past before each are systematically murdered themselves.)

Towers’ first attempt was the 1965 film Ten Little Indians, which was more of a remake of the 1945 screen adaptation of And Then There Were None (with its “happy” ending) than an original take on Christie’s source novel. The ’65 version also transported the story from a remote English island to an Alpine mansion and glamorized some of the characters, such as replacing the religious spinster with a glamorous actress and converting the drunken socialite into a popular singer—allowing for pop idol Fabian to croon on screen as part of his new contract with Fox. Among its other minor changes to the ten doomed guests was star Hugh O’Brian getting “the Tony Danza treatment” as Christie’s leading man, renamed from Philip Lombard to Hugh Lombard.

This latter change was inexplicably carried over to Oliver Reed’s characterization of the roguish Mr. Lombard in the 1974 adaptation, which borrowed liberally in many other ways from the previous version, including Towers copying much dialogue verbatim from his ’65 screenplay. Other than being the first major adaptation of the story to be filmed in color, the 1974 version also distinguishes itself with yet another new setting, this time moving the action to an elegant—but inexplicably abandoned—hotel in the Iranian desert. Continue reading →