Teresa Reviews “Sleeping Murder” (2006): Buried Memories and Super Troupers
(This review is part of Teresa Peschel’s Agatha Christie movie project. Read more about it at the above link.)
Fidelity to text: 2 garrotes.
The producers made dozens of changes from irritating but minor (main character names) to wholesale rewrites. The Funnybones theatrical troupe is completely new. So are the dramatic changes to Gwenda’s mother and stepmother. Oh, and Gwenda isn’t a happy newlywed either, with an adoring, handsome husband her own age. She’s got a fiancé, but he is a much older businessman who remains in India.
Quality of movie on its own: 4 garrotes.
I liked this version. Yes, it’s not true to the text, but it was lively and fun to watch. Great actors and actresses chewed the scenery with gusto. I would have given it a higher score except Miss Marple’s solution was so truncated as to have been pulled out of her knitting bag. There were other plot holes as well. Worse, plenty of the actors had poor enunciation so I didn’t always know what they were saying. Subtitles would have fixed this issue but alas, ITV Productions didn’t pay for them.
This version of Sleeping Murder is very, very different from Joan Hickson’s 1987 opus. The main beats of the text are there: orphaned young woman arrives in England after growing up overseas and by an astounding coincidence buys the house she lived in as a toddler. This is the house where, as a toddler, she witnessed her stepmother being strangled. Miss Marple shows up to solve the case. A few other characters remain from the novel, notably Dr. Kennedy, Walter Fane, his mother, Mrs. Fane, a former parlor maid, the former cook, and a clerk in a yarn shop.
After that, the script veers off into new and exciting territory. We begin in India, with color and drama and Kelvin Halliday’s wife dying tragically in a car accident. The grieving widower and his toddler daughter sail off to England, don’t meet anyone onboard ship, land in Dillmouth, and he meets the hot redheaded actress, Helen Marsden. She is the star of a small theatrical troupe called the Funnybones, spending the summer performing in Dillmouth. Sparks fly. They don’t wait for the quickie wedding to the consternation of their servants or the villagers.
Then Helen Marsden vanishes the night before the wedding.
Jump to today, and we meet the grown-up Gwenda Halliday, fiancée of an older man whose face we never see. He stays in India because his business is more important than the hot blonde he’s marrying. Instead, he assigns a young, male employee to escort Gwenda around England. It’s always a bad idea to outsource your husbandly duties to a younger man and we get to watch the proof. Hugh Hornbeam does a lot more than help Gwenda buy and rehab a house.
Gwenda purchases the mysteriously familiar house, and soon strange memories surface.
Hugh turns out to have a dear friend (or distant relative, the film wasn’t clear) named Miss Marple. She arrives and the vivid, complicated past is uncovered.
The novel was almost completely rewritten to incorporate Helen and the Funnybones. As a result, we get to enjoy period music hall song and dance routines, with bits of comedy thrown in. The Funnybones interact with major and minor characters in the past and in the present. I didn’t mind at all. We even get an interesting subplot involving Walter Fane, his mother, and two of the Funnybones.
What I did mind, and the reason for not awarding the fifth garrote, was that the film was too short. Ninety-three minutes was not enough time for Miss Marple to convincingly solve the disappearance of Helen Marsden. At best, you could say that she’s naturally suspicious of whatever she’s told. Being handed a conveniently saved postcard along with a creepy epigram on the back of an old photograph (so the handwriting can be matched up) makes her wary. So does Dr. Kennedy’s name confusion between Kelvin Halliday’s dead wife from India and potential wife #2, Helen Marsden. I’m guessing here because even though Miss Marple witnessed Dr. Kenney’s mix-up, we don’t see her react.
A few added lines would have made her deductions plausible.
A few more added minutes of film would have made clear how plot-critical information would have magically arrived from India. Supposedly the film takes place in 1951. They had telephones and telegraphs way back then, but you couldn’t get instant information from the Indian bureaucracy that was exactly what was needed to solve the murder. I don’t believe you could get instant information from today’s Indian bureaucracy. Or any bureaucracy. Bureaucracies don’t work that way. It takes time for clerks to go digging through dusty filing cabinets crammed with decades-old records.
There was also the question of Indian policework and forensics in 1934. A tragic auto accident generally leaves some kind of body to be identified. Not in India, which I find hard to believe. No police force anywhere likes loose ends and missing bodies are a major loose end. If the Indian police force can send an officer to Dillmouth, England, they’ll check the wrecked car for a body.
We also didn’t spend nearly enough time with the murderer, establishing their motives. This murderer needed screen time. Otherwise, the solution is because the scriptwriter said so and not because the crime grew organically from the characters.
The connection between Gwenda’s mother and stepmother was really farfetched. Another pass on the script would have helped.
The Funnybones and their interactions with each other and everyone else used up plot space that could have been used to solve these issues. That said, I liked watching them very much and would have liked more screen time with them, but not at the expense of seeing Miss Marple get more real clues and solve the mystery in a fashion that I could follow.
ITV Productions should have splurged on another ten minutes of film stock. Maybe fifteen.
It’s still a fun movie to watch. Just go into this version of Sleeping Murder knowing that it’s not true to the text other than in the most basic way. If you can suspend your resentment of hack screenwriters “improving” Agatha Christie, you’ll enjoy this movie.
Otherwise, stick with Joan Hickson’s version which follows the text about as closely as a movie can follow a novel.
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