Teresa Reviews “The Sittaford Mystery” (2006)

Fidelity to text: 1 knife.

The novel was eviscerated. Miss Marple was shoved in against her will as evidenced by her remaining defiantly offstage for long stretches. The central murder remains as does the séance, the escaped prisoner, and a few names. Characters are added, dropped, and altered beyond recognition. The murderer changes completely and has a wildly different motivation.

Quality of movie on its own: 2 knives.

It’s incoherent; the scriptwriters try desperately to shove ten pounds of plot into a five-pound running length. Very atmospheric, though with lovely snow, good music, fine English country house and quaint inn porn (animal heads galore) and Timothy Dalton chewing the scenery.

I want you to queue up Sir Mix-a-Lot and “Baby Got Back” for this:

Oh. My. God.
Look at that plot!

You’ll have to sit through this episode twice (at least) in order to understand what’s going on. This film is 93 minutes long. That was not long enough for all the disparate plot threads to be woven together in a cohesive fashion. The film needed a minimum of another twenty minutes running time to do it justice.

But since ITV productions didn’t do that, you, dear viewer, will be left asking what just happened? Rewind, dammit, so I can figure this one out. That’s what we did. Repeatedly. Yet there were many moments when I still can’t tell you what was going on.

The trouble starts with forcing Miss Marple into a property that was never written for her. This can work: it did with ITV’s own By the Pricking of My Thumbs, a Tommy and Tuppence novel. Not here. In fact, Miss Marple disappeared for long stretches of the film, doing heaven only knows what in Sittaford House, sitting out the blizzard. We assume she was questioning the staff (we only see one servant in the mansion but there has to be more), knitting, and speed-reading Captain Trevelyan’s memoirs. She certainly wasn’t at the Three Crowns Inn, inspecting the body and questioning the guests, even though most of the action takes place there.

An entirely new plot is shoehorned into the novel, vastly expanding Captain Trevelyan’s character and backstory. Suddenly, he’s a war hero (WWI), a suspected war profiteer (WWII), an Olympic skater between wars (I think; the dialog was incomprehensible at many key points), a major contender for becoming the new prime minister (Winston Churchill (!) has a scene with Captain Trevelyan), and he’s a noted archeologist having discovered a major tomb in Egypt back in 1927 that let him make his fortune!

Indiana Jones wasn’t this busy.

The point of all this fluffery must be to give Timothy Dalton something to do to earn his paycheck. In the novel, Captain Trevelyan exists to be swiftly murdered. He doesn’t even get one line. In the movie — since it’s Timothy Dalton — when he’s not emoting in front of us, he’s being talked about.

Which I can understand. It’s Timothy Dalton and my goodness does he look yummy. Some men age very well, and he belongs to that lucky cohort. He’s also got to be expensive so the producers made sure to get their money’s worth. Pity they didn’t spend some of their money on a better script or more filmstock.

Even so, he doesn’t age that well. I had a hard time believing that young, lovely, dewy, eighteen-year-old Violet Willets (Carey Mulligan) fell madly in love with a man old enough to be her grandfather. I know why he did and it’s not just because Violet resembles the woman he callously abandoned twenty-five years prior in Egypt. Violet’s delicious, naïve, and believes every word he says and what man doesn’t want that? As for Violet, she didn’t come across as a gold-digger, which is the usual reason for sweet 18-year-olds to marry men old enough to be their grandfather.* Or maybe she was and the tacked-on ending where Violet runs off to Argentina with Emily Trefusis proves it. Violet certainly wasn’t very broken up about her husband being murdered on their wedding night.

* [Bill notes: Dalton was 60 in 2006. If Trevelyan fought in WWI, and with Churchill leaving office in 1955, meant Trevelyan had to be older.]

If anything, she seemed relieved. She got it all. The Trevelyan name, the inheritance, and two tickets to Buenos Aires, and she didn’t have to sacrifice her sweet toothsome body to some old man, even if he was Timothy Dalton.

The Egyptian subplot was of major importance yet it didn’t make any sense. There was the paranormal aspect too, with a ghostly maiden showing up in Captain Trevelyan’s visions. Was there a curse on the gold scorpion? Was he going crazy? The script doesn’t tell us. The ghost appears and then vanishes without any follow-on. The script also doesn’t tell us how an Egyptian servant can show up in isolated Sittaford in 1949 and get hired, no questions asked. The servant problem was bad enough that the upper crust didn’t ask as many questions as they could but here? Really?

We know Captain Trevelyan had potentially suspect doings in Egypt. Yet he wasn’t suspicious when this mysterious Egyptian showed up at his door? He’d been having weird dreams about his past. He’s got a burgeoning political career which means close scrutiny of his private life. He’s supposed to be a smart man.

Then there’s the even more incoherent subplot about the escaped prisoner from Dartmoor prison. None of that made sense; not the purchase of the inn a year prior to the events of the story, not the backstory of how the star-crossed lovers met, not how the prisoner escaped from Dartmoor prison and found his way across the moors to be reunited with his paramour and cousin and their eventual escape to freedom.

Add in the American war profiteer who helped Captain Trevelyan make a fortune manufacturing substandard munitions that killed American sailors prior to meeting the enemy. The American war profiteer’s personal aide-de-camp and quack doctor made even less sense. Why did the war profiteer need him around, other than as a dogsbody? There was mumbled dialog that sounded like they were both in the mafia, but it was unclear.

We also meet the incompetent government clerk who — it is finally revealed — is looking into Captain Trevelyan’s background to ensure nothing questionable is revealed to the press, thus discrediting the party. He’s not doing a very good job if Captain Trevelyan was a known associate of American war profiteers and he doesn’t know.

Then there’s Charles Burnaby. In the novel, he’s boy-reporter, Charles Enderby. The name change was just the start of the complete reworking of motives and backstory. Yet we get no foreshadowing of his dramatic personal life or of his connections to the Trevelyan family. We get almost nothing of James Pearson’s connection to Captain Trevelyan either. We get even less of a reason for Emily Trefusis to be engaged to James Pearson, boy-alcoholic, other than that old standby: he’ll inherit big someday when Captain Trevelyan dies. Maybe that’s why Emily runs off to Argentina with Violet. She gets the money and the girl and doesn’t have to marry the boy-alcoholic.

I could rant on for pages, but the upshot is simple. This movie was a mess. ITV Productions could have saved the cost of Timothy Dalton’s salary and paid for a better script. Or, they could have capitalized on Timothy Dalton and added another twenty minutes of movie, explaining all the subplots and how they wove together. Either way would work.

As for you, dear reader. Skip this film other than for completeness sake. If you do watch it, expect to watch it twice to figure out what’s going on.

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