Teresa Reviews “By the Pricking of My Thumbs” (2006)

Fidelity to text: 2 poison bottles.
Miss Marple was added to a Tommy and Tuppence novel. The overall arc of the original novel remains. There are numerous changes to time period, the main plot, subplots, minor characters, names, locations, …. It’s a long list.

Quality of movie on its own: 4 poison bottles.
I didn’t care that this was never a Miss Marple property! She fit in beautifully, taking the place of an absent Tommy. He’s off gallivanting on some spy business stuff and appears only when needed. The film moved along smartly, and I could usually follow the action despite mumbling on the part of the cast. Great clothes, locations, and most of all, atmosphere.

ITV Marple productions are hit or miss. By the Pricking of My Thumbs, despite Miss Marple never coming anywhere near the original novel, was a hit. She fitted in surprisingly well. We meet Tommy and Tuppence visiting an elderly, unpleasant aunt in a high-end rest home and who else is there visiting?

Miss Marple, naturally.

You would expect to meet Miss Marple visiting an elderly friend of hers at a rest home. Tommy doesn’t listen to Tuppence’s anxiety, but eagle-eared Miss Marple does and away we go. It felt natural, unlike claiming that somehow, someway, Jane Marple is related to Tommy, Tuppence, or anyone they know. She’s not. Miss Marple is what she is: a nosy, perennially curious old lady with a taste for mysterious death. She’s thrilled to go haring off with a total stranger based on disquieting feelings of creepiness and wrongness.

The overall arc of the story remains: a child’s murder under mysterious circumstances and the disappearance of an old lady. You still get creepy villagers, loquacious villagers, friendly villagers, hostile villagers, and the new lord of the manor. You lose Tommy and his co-worker, Ivor Smith, and their investigation into some criminal gang of thieves. You lose the gang of thieves. You also lose the numerous child murders that took place over the years along with other murders of people who look at our murderer with suspicion. There were plenty of child murders in the novel; so many that the actual count is never given. It’s implied that there were at least five. Or more.

And people say Agatha writes cozies. There was also the comment from a loquacious villager to Tuppence about how Sir Phillip loved children but not in the normal way. That didn’t quite make it into the film, although Sir Philip did.

To substitute for the criminal gang of thieves subplot we get young love in the form of a village lass, an American soldier stationed nearby, and the local bobby. We also get a nod to Sir Phillip’s interest in children with an even weirder subplot about filming Jane Eyre and having a younger village lass portray Jane Eyre’s dying friend. This young village lass would give Veruca Salt a run for her money. She proves useful when she tells Tuppence the location of the mysterious house in the painting Mrs. Lancaster gives to Aunt Ida.

Oh, and Nellie Bligh? She’s not just Sir Phillip’s long-suffering and devoted secretary in this version. She’s also the vicar’s wife. She and her husband, the vicar, have plenty of secrets they’d like to stay buried. Or in the vicar’s case, drowned.

Another major change was making Tuppence into an alcoholic. I’m ambivalent about this change. It worked within the constraints of the movie but I can’t see Tuppence ever falling inside a bottle. She’s too practical and too imaginative. She’d be off doing good works in the local parish. Writing racy novels. Running her own detective agency. Becoming a lush because she doesn’t know what to do with herself and she resents not being a spy like Tommy? I dunno.

I suppose the scriptwriter couldn’t conceive of a strong, intelligent, older woman who doesn’t end up with the life she dreamed of as a young woman and yet remains sober. Imagine that. Coping with disappointment with grace instead of addiction. How very old-fashioned.

Tuppence looked great, though, despite dipping into a bottle of scotch at every opportunity. I’ve been recently rereading The Lost Art of Dress by Linda Przybyszewski. Ms. Przybyszewski devotes many pages to discussing how previous to the early ‘60’s adult women did not dress like teenagers, or worse, like toddlers. Teenage girls dressed for their age and planned for when they got enough years under their belts to dress in a more … mature way. Tuppence’s wardrobe in By the Pricking of My Thumbs is a perfect example of this dictate. Her clothes are perfectly fitted and designed for an older, sophisticated, worldly woman who can handle showing off her cleavage and handle men’s responses to said cleavage.

You’ve heard of mutton dressed like lamb? Well, lambs shouldn’t dress like mutton. Sophisticated, classy, experienced ladies of a certain age and experience dress more dramatically. That’s Tuppence in this movie. Our young love interest for the G.I.? She wears pretty sundresses and youthful cardigans. Our Veruca Salt clone dresses still younger. They don’t wear each other’s clothes.

Similarly, Miss Marple dresses for her age too. She’s moved past fascinating men and making their IQ drop as their sap rises. Her clothes are practical and hardwearing.

As in the novel, Tuppence confronts the murderer. It is, however, Miss Marple (since it’s her show) who deduces the plot behind the plot. I thought she was very clever and it made sense. It did not feel like she pulled the solution out of her knitting bag. The village is tiny, isolated, suspiciously clean, and had been ruled since time immemorial by the Warrender family. They had long since died out, although the local church was filled with centuries of memorial plaques dedicated to various family members. So why is a plaque dedicated to Julia Starke smack in the middle of the Warrender family plaques? No one in this inbred, hidebound village with not a blade of grass out of place complains about the desecration?

No, the villagers take it in stride. There’s a reason and not just because Sir Phillip bought the old Warrender estate and moved in, filling the role in the village once filled by the Warrenders. The Warrenders, like the villagers, are described as being inbred.

Inbreeding leads to craziness as well as to birth defects and so it proves here too.

I’ll be honest. I did not expect to like this movie. I like Tommy and Tuppence and wish that their novels would be filmed accurately. They are that rarity in Agatha Christie’s oeuvre: they age, they have a family, and they live in the real world. As the world changes, their novels change, reflecting the era in which they were written. The idea of shoehorning Miss Marple into one of their stories felt ill-conceived at best.

However, it worked. It was fun, it was well-plotted with lots of twists and turns, and yet despite all the changes, it still played true to the overall story arc of the novel. Give this one a try with an open mind. I’d watch it again.

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