Teresa Reviews “The Secret of Chimneys” (2010)

Fidelity to text: One gun (some names match and the house is terrific)

Quality of movie: One gun (plot holes you could sail battleships through)

My goodness, but those are low rankings. Remember, this is on a scale of one to five, with one being the lowest and five the highest. Officially, this is the third Agatha Christie or Agatha-like film I’ve reviewed. We’ve watched several of them in the past, but I didn’t review them so we’ll have to re-watch them.

Darn the bad luck.

Or good luck, I should say, since watching virtually any of the other adaptations will take the taste of this stinker out of my mouth.

Where to start with this mess. Deep sigh. Let’s start with the first of a series of egregious changes the producers inflicted on a fast-moving thriller with a studly romantic leading man.

Here’s number one: Miss Marple solves the crime. Miss Marple! I ask you. How could Miss Marple show up when Agatha published The Secret of Chimneys in 1925? Miss Marple arrived in 1927 in a short story and then in 1930, in the novel The Murder at the Vicarage. Chimneys marks the first appearance of Inspector Battle, criminally underused in both prose and film.

After that, it gets worse.

In the novel, our hero is Anthony Cade, an adventurer with a past. He’s virile, a stud, not entirely honest, dashing, daring, and everything else you want your romantic lead to be. You can see why Virginia falls in love with this exciting man of action. In the film, he’s relegated to a supporting player with about fifteen minutes of screen time. He’s also been thoroughly castrated by the film-makers into a whiny, ineffective dull dweeb. The actor playing Anthony Cade also looks so much like the actor playing Bill Eversleigh that I had trouble telling them apart. Bill Eversleigh is supposed to be a waste of space and he is. In the novel, the contrast between the two men is immense. Here, it’s not.

Virginia Revel, our heroine, is no longer a dashing widow-about-town. Nope, she’s become Lord Caterham’s younger daughter. At least she can’t be confused with Bundle, Lord Caterham’s other daughter.

The plot of derring-do, international intrigue, African connections, missing heirs to thrones, secret letters and tell-all memoirs, jewel thieves, and visiting detectives from France vanishes. Instead we get a mess that Agatha would have never written. I would agree that Chimneys can be preposterous at times, but her plot held together even when it was far-fetched.

This mess did not.

The other characters are treated equally badly. Lord Caterham? Completely rewritten. Treadwell, the butler, gets a sex-change with no explanation. Other characters vanish entirely and totally new characters show up. Some of these characters get murdered too, so the reason they appear is to die, not because the film-makers wanted to show fidelity to the original text.

George Lomax remains as does his secretary, Bill Eversleigh. George Lomax is similar in that he’s a bureaucrat trying to solve diplomatic issues for the good of England. He becomes not just irritating, but obviously and openly incompetent, which he is not in the novel.

A huge diamond still disappears. That stays the same. Entirely new characters get murdered. There is virtually nothing left of the original story, other than a few names and sometimes a line of dialog here and there.

Why did the film-makers do this? My best guess is that the makers of the BBC television series, Agatha Christie’s Marple, ran out of actual Agatha Christie stories about Miss Marple. This fiasco appears late in season 5. Since there was money to be made, other Christie stories got shoe-horned into submission and here we are. A Miss Marple mystery that never featured Miss Marple in the first place.

That brings us to the movie itself. I should say TV episode but it’s about 90 minutes long and feels like a movie rather than a Jessica Fletcher Murder, She Wrote episode.

As a film, the action moves along reasonably well. The dialog was clear. The house standing in for Chimneys is fantastic, a really premium English Country House on steroids. Those floors! That carved paneling! A secret passageway hidden behind a Vandyke painting of the Duke of Richmond! Balconies and stately grounds and suits of armor!

I have no idea how they keep that house clean and those thousands of acres of gardens manicured and all that stonework repointed when there appeared to be two, count them, two servants. That would be the thieving maid, run off in 1932, and the other maid, elevated to the position of head housekeeper even though she was named Treadwell, like the butler in the novel.

The acting was decent, other than the utterly bland Ken doll the casting director located to play Anthony Cade. There must be some actor out there who can channel Errol Flynn because that’s who should be playing Anthony Cade. Not some piece of carved pine with plastic hair. The young man is probably quite nice in real life but he did not light up the screen and make me -> feel <- why Virginia fell at his feet, panting to get to know him better. Some of us radiate charisma. The rest of us just muddle along. The mystery plot, however, was atrocious. There were obvious red herrings everywhere. The African connection was a throw-away line. There was no lost heir to the throne. The reason for the theft of the jewel was absurd. No one behaved in character, least of all Lord Caterham. Parts that could have been interesting, like the motivation of the National Trust representative, were given short-shrift. She, by the way, was far more vigorous and manly than Anthony Cade was. None of the writers seemed to have any idea what servants do or how they would act in the mid-1950s (which is when the main story takes place). Miss Marple pulled the solution out of her handbag. George Lomax was supposed to be capable and yet seemed unable to do the most cursory of background checks. And then, when a character’s true identity was revealed, everyone still used his false name and position in life even though he couldn’t have possibly been that person! If you’re watching all six seasons of Agatha Christie’s Marple, there’s no reason to skip this episode, even though you won’t watch it a second time. If you don’t know that it’s based on a wildly different novel, you’ll notice the plot holes but they won’t be as irritating as if you’re expecting a story that is close to the Secret of Chimneys.

Eventually, someone will make a good filmed version of The Secret of Chimneys. The novel is very much of its time, written in 1924 and published in 1925, so that time will be far off in the future, when we’ve gotten over our chronocentrism and quit judging people of the past by the standards of today.

This movie was bad. Knowing what the original story was and what the movie could have been, makes it worse.

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