Teresa Reviews “The Blue Geranium” (2010)

Fidelity to text:

The original story is there but it’s been expanded far beyond what Agatha sketched out, especially considering how minimalist the source material is.

Quality of movie:

It’s good on its own merits and it’s a more interesting story than the original short story. Only purists will carp.

This was our third watched episode of the ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Marple television adaptation of Miss Marple novels and short stories. We don’t watch these episodes in order so for you completists, this film is episode three of season five.

The quality of the production is really holding up, based on the three episodes we’ve seen to date. These films don’t feel like television episodes. They feel like movies in terms of sets, costumes, background music, acting, and pacing.

I was, I admit, apprehensive about this particular episode after our terrible experience with The Secret of Chimneys. That movie was dreadful; a pale, castrated shadow of the novel which didn’t involve Jane Marple in the first place.

Why was I concerned this time? The Blue Geranium is a Miss Marple short story, not another story shoehorned into the series so the TV producers could make more episodes and thus more money. However, like Chimneys, The Blue Geranium storyline was attacked by scriptwriters.

In this case, the scriptwriters made the story better.

The Blue Geranium is one of Agatha’s earliest short stories involving Jane Marple. Jane is still evolving as a character. Agatha also used the hackneyed and awkward trope of a group of people sitting around a dinner table telling true crime stories to see if the other dinner guests can figure out whodunit.

This is not a trope I’m fond of. There’s no tension because the mystery is secondhand. The mysteries are pared down to skeletal remnants, another reason not to care what happens to the participants. In these short stories, Jane is the winner of each competition. She always knows because someone in the village of St. Mary Mead did something similar. She’s also twittering and dithery, in her black lace mittens and lacy fichus and fluffy pink wool shawl. As Agatha developed Jane Marple, she became a more active, competent amateur detective and less of a caricature of a ye olde Victorian Spinster Lady with a capital L.

The mystery in The Blue Geranium is still there but it has been amplified. The original protagonists remain: George Pritchard, his crazy wife, Mary, Nurse Copling, the mysterious psychic, Zarida. The other protagonists, chatting over dinner, vanish with the exception of Jane and Sir Henry Clithering.

To that, a new cast of characters was added to flesh out the story: George’s ne’er-do-well brother, his wife (George’s old flame and Mary’s sister), their kids, the vicar, the vicar’s niece, the doctor, the social-climbing neighbors, the golf club set, the artist, the mysterious drunk, the list goes on.

And it works! It works so much better than the original story which was clever with its clues but nothing special. The characters become breathing, living people with motivations, family dynamics, and an entire school of red herrings rather than the paper dolls we started with.

The Blue Geranium is still there.

A Few Words about Blue Flowers

For the non-gardeners out there, geraniums do not come in blue. Nor do hollyhocks or primroses. Those flowers come in a lot of colors but blue isn’t one of them. This is important to the storyline and it provides a clue right in the title to the more scientifically-minded reader, who remembers basic chemistry class.

As an aside for you non-gardeners, very few flowers are blue. Every other color is present in the garden other than blue or true black. There are loads of green flowers; mostly small and on trees, which is why you don’t notice them. When gardening catalogs claim a flower is blue, they are lying. The flower is actually a shade of purple. If you’re an ad copy writer, you describe the blossom in lyrical terms to fool the unwary gardener into believing that yes! This flower will be blue! Blue dahlias! Blue tulips! Blue hyacinths! Blue violets! Blue hydrangeas (important clue here)! Blue geraniums and hollyhocks and primroses!

These flowers are not blue.

They are shades of purple and violet. Hold a blue hyacinth blossom up to the sky on a clear, sunny day and you’ll see how purple it really is. If you want true-blue flowers, like an indigo bunting is blue and a bluebird is not, you’ll have to grow Himalayan Blue Poppies and good luck with that endeavor since those are one of the fussiest flowers in the world to grow.

Those blue carnations you get at the florist? They’re dyed.

But back to the film. The added elements held together beautifully, explaining the complex motivations far better. Jane fits in much better too, since she’s on the spot during the crimes and not commenting on them from a bloodless remove over dinner. She’s involved. She knows these complicated, hurting people. Then, at the last possible moment, she realizes the truth. She makes a daring, last-minute move to save the day, rescue the innocent, and name the true villain.

One thing about the film I did not like. Mary, who is suitably crazy and antagonistic, is described by the other characters as a glutton. They imply she’s ruled by her appetites (which she is). They claim she’s fat, even obese.

But she’s not. We see Mary out of bed in a fitted blue dress.

Yeah, she’s no size 6. I’d say about a size 18. She’s overweight but the way the other characters talk, she’s morbidly obese. She is not. She is the size of a normal woman. Perhaps carrying some extra weight during the rationing period after World War II was cause for comment and that’s why the scriptwriters did this.

It was jarring and a reminder that Hollywood has no idea what normal people look like. In Hollywood, if you have any body fat at all, you’re obese and if you’re a normal weight, you’re morbidly obese, but if you’re actually obese and you’re the flavor of the month, you’re a freedom fighter against unrealistic standards of beauty until you stop being popular. At that point, you become — once again — disgustingly obese and you should vanish so decent people don’t have to witness your flabby self.

But other than that criticism, I really enjoyed The Blue Geranium. The scriptwriters’ additions fleshed out the story beautifully, making a mediocre short story into a compelling, I’ll-watch-this-again film.

* Hydrangeas come in three basic colors: white, pink, and what gardening catalogs euphemistically label blue although it’s really more of a purple. If you manipulate the acidity of your soil, you can magically alter the color of your hydrangeas, turning pink flowers blue-ish and vice versa. White flowering hydrangeas remain white. It does take a growing season and some knowledge of basic chemistry along with a soil testing kit. Return to text

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