• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 601 0

not what it was, Miss Marple thinks to herself as she sits knitting. The old landmarks were still there, the church and the vicarage and Dr Haydock’s house, but the appearance of so many of the shops in the village street had been rendered unrecognizable by modernization, and the new housing development was, to Miss Marple, an eye-sore. Miss Marple was growing old, and so was Agatha Christie, who was now nearly as old as her beloved village sleuth had always been. In The Mirror Crack’d, she charts the changes with a not unsympathetic accuracy, but never at the expense of the plot, which is kept firmly in the foreground. The first murder is followed by others. Miss Marple’s young friend Dermot Craddock, now a Chief Inspector, investigates, but it is she who arrives at the truth. A close reading of Chapter 2 suggests that Miss Marple is thinking along the right tracks well before the first murder has been committed.

Permanently disfigured by progress, St Mary Mead is temporarily either disfigured or adorned by the famous filmstar Marina Gregg, her husband Jason Hudd, who is to direct her new movie, and several other film people. One of Marina Gregg’s greatest films had been Mary, Queen of Scots: the new film was to be about Elisabeth of Austria. This is not a world in which Miss Marple moves with great certainty, and she is at a further disadvantage in not having been present on the occasion when the first victim died. She has to rely on Dolly Bantry’s account of what happened. The final death, after the mystery has been uncovered, is perhaps a suicide, perhaps a compassionate murder. Miss Marple is content not to know for certain.

Some months before publication, Agatha Christie visited a movie studio, where Murder at the Gallop, the second of the Miss Marple films, was being made. She visited the set while filming was in progress, and met Margaret Rutherford, who played Miss Marple. Mrs Christie had already expressed herself on the subject of the actress’s unsuitability for the role, but the two women got on remarkably well and, when The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side was published in the autumn, it was dedicated ‘To Margaret Rutherford in admiration’.

When The Mirror Crack’d came to be filmed, many years later in 1980, both Agatha Christie and Margaret Rutherford were dead, and Miss Marple was played by Angela Lansbury. Though it was produced for EMI by the same team which had been responsible for the films of Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978), and was, like those films, a star-studded affair, The Mirror Crack’d (the movie used this abbreviated title) was distinctly inferior to them. The blame is to be shared among the script-writers, Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandler, and the director, Guy Hamilton. The writers attempted to jazz up the dialogue with ghastly double-entendres and phrases which one never thought to hear in Agatha Christie. One actress says of another that she entered, ‘looking like shit’. There is an embarrassingly coy reference to the police inspector’s ‘night-stick’. A number of tired old jokes which had been going the theatrical rounds for years are worked into the script as examples of witty Hollywood-type repartee.

Already crippled by its dialogue, the film is finally dealt its death blow by the slow, heavy and cliche´-ridden direction. You sympathize with the cast, headed by Elizabeth Taylor (Marina Gregg), Rock Hudson (her husband), Angela Lansbury (Miss Marple), Edward Fox (Inspector Dermot Craddock, here said, for no apparent reason, to be Miss Marple’s nephew), Tony Curtis, Kim Novak and Geraldine Chaplin.

Presumably because the mass audience would not be quite certain who Elisabeth of Austria was, the film Marina Gregg is making is about Mary, Queen of Scots. Perhaps a remake of her earlier success?

A television adaptation was first shown on BBC TV on 27 December 1992.

About Charles Osborne

This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999).