Last night we decided to watch a film, but didn’t have any idea what we wanted to watch. (Yes, of course we have a list; and, no, we never consult it.)

Knowing that looking either on On Demand or on Netflix randomly turns out to be frustrating at best, I went to YouTube, which of course has more movies available than have ever been made. But YouTube being YouTube, it gives you random recommendations, and we took the first one on my YouTube home page – “The Tenth Man”.

It turns out that “The Tenth Man” is the title of at least three films and a play and a novel. All proved relatively successful and convinced me that if I ever write a novel, write or produce a play, or write or direct a film, I am going to call my creation “The Tenth Man”. It can’t fail.

Last night’s “The Tenth Man” was a film produced for British TV in 1988 based on Graham Greene’s novel of the same name, published three years earlier. I haven’t read the book, but guess (based on the mini-reviews on Goodreads) that it’s a pretty good book. And of course, I don’t know how close the film came to the book, but my guess is that was pretty close. And we enjoyed the film, even though we thought the ending could have been better. (I am not going to tell you about the ending.)

So what is this film about? It’s 1941 or so in German occupied Paris, and a number of men are randomly swept off the street and herded into a large prison cell, one of whom being a totally non-political and seemingly harmless lawyer, who turns out to be Sir Anthony Hopkins (who knew?). An officious young, tall and thin German officer walks in and states that one of every ten men in the cell (there are about 30 who have been arrested) is going to be killed to show the Parisians something or other, or to keep them from doing something or other. And, the prisoners themselves have to choose who the three will be. “We don’t care who you choose”, say the German.

They draw lots, and Anthony Hopkins is picked to be one of the three to be killed, but because he is both wealthy (he inherited his money – his law practice is not much to speak about) and a coward, he asks for someone to change places with him in return for all his worldly possessions, including money and a fancy estate outside of Paris. A young and presumably consumptive man who wishes to provide financial security for his mother and his sister, agrees. The young man is executed. Sir Anthony lives.

Move forward three years. The Nazis are gone. Anthony Hopkins is now a penniless beggar who doesn’t know where to turn, and who decides to swallow his pride and return to his former home, now occupied by the dead man’s mother and sister (it’s quite a coincidence, by the way, that the dead man’s sister is none other than Kristin Scott Thomas). He shows up at his former estate, introduces himself with a new name and says that he was a cellmate of the original owner of the house (in fact, he is of course he) and Kristin’s late brother. He is also hungry.

Meanwhile, the house itself is in shambles, and it turns out that Kristin and her mother hate living there, and they curse and despise the man who purchased his own life and the expense of their son/brother. Hopkins realizes he has to keep his identity well hidden. He has aged a bit in the Nazi prison, he has grown a long shaggy beard, and he never circulated much in the nearby town anyway, so (perhaps a bit unbelievably) no one recognizes him. He stays at the house at the request of Kristin Scott Thomas to help keep the place in order and replant the formerly extensive garden.

All is well. Perhaps there is a budding romance. But then one day, the door bell rings, another man appears (damn if he doesn’t look just like Sir Derek Jacobi) who introduces himself as the man who owned the house (much to Sir Anthony’s surprise and distress and utter confusion) and who informs them that he once again owns the house because of some new French law that voids all transactions done under duress during the Nazi occupation.

I’m not going to tell you what happens, but I will just leave you with the following thoughts: Sir Derek (the fake owner) is swarmy, Sir Anthony (the real former owner) is scared to death, and Kristin (who I don’t think has either been sir-ed or dame-ed) is totally at sea (although she is saved by her fabulous facial expressions, where she shows so much confusion and surprise that you would swear she had never read the script).

But…..there’s more

First, did you know that W. Somerset Maugham wrote a play called “The Tenth Man”. This play is apparently about an unscrupulous business man, who tells his long suffering wife that 9 out of 10 men are worthless and easy to bamboozle (I am not sure if WSM used the word “bamboozle”, but we can pretend, can’t we?) He goes about proving to her the is a master bamboozler (much to her dismay), but then he meets “the tenth” man, and the jig is up. It was made into a film in 1936.

Now comes the surprising news. Someone wrote a review of the film in The Spectator in 1936 and praised the plot and the direction. Who was that reviewer who was so pleased with “The Tenth Man”? It was 32 year old Graham Greene, who when he was 81 wrote his own “The Tenth Man” (see above, if you have short term memory problems). How ’bout that??

But wait…..there’s more. In 2016, there was another film called “The Tenth Man”. And this one we actually saw. It is focused on a rundown neighborhood, formerly a center of the Jewish community of Buenos Aires, and a charity run (not well) by the father of our anti-hero, Ariel, who returns from New York for a visit. He and his father see the world very differently (neither see it as I do, by the way) and it will take an attractive, if mysterious, woman who sees it still differently to try to help resolve their issues. We saw the Tenth Man sometime during the pandemic (or maybe even before) and found it enjoyable and interesting, if not Oscar-worthy. Although it turned out that lead actor Alan Sabbagh did win a Best Actor award in the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, and in the Lleida Latin-American Film Festival.

And then there was Paddy Chayevsky, who wrote a play “The Tenth Man” in 1959, which ran on Broadway for a year and a half (over 600 performances). And, no, Derek Jacobi was not in it – but…… Lou Jacobi was. Does that count? (And I don’t think they are related, but maybe Henry Louis Gates, Jr. knows something I don’t.)

Paddy’s “The Tenth Man” was based on Ansky’s play, “The Dybbuk”, but wasn’t set in the old country, but in Mineola, New York (I have no idea where Mineoli, even though I did have a Great Aunt Minnie). There in deepest Mineola, a number of old Russian Jewish men live and spend all their times doing the things that old Russian Jewish men do, until something unusual happens. The granddaughter of one them seems to become possessed by a dybbuk. What to do?

That’s it for The Tenth Men. But if you want something close, how about Agatha Christie? Remember, she had ten, then there were nine, then there were eight, then there were seven, and so on until “And Then There Were None.”