Support Peschel Press at no cost to you! Buy the Joan Hickson box set. Fidelity to text: 3 garottes. There are a number of changes. Small ones include a few name changes, many dropped characters, and changing the time setting which matters more than you think. Large ones include entirely new characters (which worked) and […]
Support Peschel Press at no cost to you! Buy this movie from Amazon. Fidelity to text: 2 and 1/2 knives. Plenty of changes, the most egregious being rewriting Carrie Louise’s personality and philanthropism and changing Lewis Serrocold’s motives. Other characters disappear altogether, get combined, or are raised from the dead (Carrie Louise’s husband #2). The […]
Support Peschel Press at no cost to you! Buy the Joan Hickson box set. Fidelity to text: 3 and 1/2 guns. Everything major is present and accounted for right up until the ending. The problem is way too much compression of the text. In addition, the time period was changed from the early 1960s to […]
Support Peschel Press at no cost to you! Buy the Joan Hickson box set. Fidelity to text: 4 garottes. The producers didn’t change much, other than shifting the film’s time period to the early 1950s and compressing and removing minor characters. Everything important is present and accounted for. Quality of movie on its own: 4 […]
Fidelity to text: 1 poison bottle. Where to start, where to start. There are so many choices. This novel (a personal favorite) never starred Miss Marple. Agatha had been writing Miss Marple novels and short stories for over a decade by the time she wrote Murder is Easy (1939) so if she’d wanted this to […]
Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster by Helen Andrews Four Stars. Nonfiction, social history, pop culture, biographies This is a fascinating little book. It’s very readable, which is both nice and unusual in this sort of polemic. It’s short too, so you’ll race through it in no time. The author, […]
Fidelity to text: 4 and 1/2 poison bottles. ITV Productions is unreliable when it comes to fidelity to text but in this case, they were virtually letter-perfect. Miss Ramsbottom was eliminated, as were a few minor housemaids, secretaries, and such. Miss Marple gets one of Inspector Neele’s scenes. Quality of movie on its own: 4 […]
Fidelity to text: 1 and 1/2 poison bottles. If you’re familiar with the novel, you’ll be aghast at what ITV Productions did to the story line. About all that remains is Verity herself, her tragic life, and Jason Rafiel’s enjoyment of manipulating people. Oh, and the coach tour of the great houses of England. That’s […]
Fidelity to text: 3 guns. The usual changes of condensing or removing characters, some of whom were important (Dr. Stone and his hapless assistant). The plan to trap the murderer is radically different and, worst of all, one of the murderers commits suicide out of remorse. No, they did not. They killed him and they […]
Fidelity to text: three poison bottles. The scriptwriters changed things, starting with the title! The novel’s title is A Pocket Full of Rye. It’s a tiny difference but there and I have no idea why they did it. It’s like changing names of characters, in this case, Miss Ramsbottom becoming Miss Henderson. There’s no reason […]