Strangulation on a Train: 4.50 from Paddington (2004) review
(Note: You may also see this titled What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! That’s the title used in the American market since the British publishers believed that Americans wouldn’t recognize the railway reference in the title.)
Fidelity to text: 2 1/2 garottes
The screenwriter made a lot of changes. The largest, without a doubt, is reworking the murderer’s motivation to make us ooze with sympathy for the trap in which he finds himself. He also murders one less person than in the novel, because hey, he’s doing it all for love and not for love of money.
Miss Marple wouldn’t use this phrase but I will because she’d agree: as if!
Another major change was adding a completely new character to investigate. And Noël Coward, of all people. He wasn’t in the novel either, but there he is, entertaining Lord Mountbatten with Lucy Eyelesbarrow. She gets around, that girl. If you’re familiar with the novel, you’ll recognize plenty of other discrepancies, both large and small.
Quality of film: 3 1/2 garottes
I didn’t remember the novel well, so I wasn’t looking for mistakes or adaptation errors. I would have given this adaptation a higher rating except for the criminal lack of subtitles and the fact that I could not figure out how Miss Marple made that deductive leap to unearth the murderer in the last fifteen minutes. The complete lack of a reason killed the movie for me. This is one case where adapting the novel would have been an improvement. Agatha doesn’t give an explanation for Miss Marple’s leap of deduction either. She just knows.
So here we are with the third ITV production of Agatha Christie’s Marple. We’ve organized enough now to watch the productions in order of original air date (December of 2004 here). Sadly, as I mentioned earlier, ITV doesn’t feel the need to follow Agatha’s own order of short stories and novels. They play fast and loose with the timeline.
They also played fast and loose with the novel.
Characters vanish, not surprising since a 94-minute movie doesn’t have a lot of time for quaint natives, faithful servants, and local color. Mysteriously, 94 minutes did allow enough time for Miss Marple to interrupt Noël Coward’s song routine with Lucy Eyelesbarrow in the middle of a cocktail party to ask for her assistance in locating a body. That was not in the text, but it worked in the film. A few minutes were spent showing how incredibly well-connected Lucy is: she was Noël Coward’s temporary housekeeper and he was pathetically grateful to have her services. Thus, Lucy arriving at Rutherford Hall and offering her services to the hard-up Crackenthorpe family and having them eagerly say yes was easy to accept.
Since it has been decades since I read 4:50 from Paddington, I didn’t notice that the railway clerk was rude and officious instead of being Miss Marple’s helpful great-nephew. Yet it worked. Two daft old ladies claiming they’d seen a murder and the body had been thrown from the train? They’d get exactly that response.
John Hannah showed up as the local inspector (Tom Campbell) who also, conveniently, rents rooms to boarders. Miss Marple moves in to enjoy the quaint village, a fact he has a hard time believing. Unless you watch a lot of TV, you might remember John Hannah best as Jonathan Carnahan in The Mummy (1999, the Brendan Frasier version, not the Tom Cruise debacle). He was just as fun to watch interacting with Miss Marple, since she remembered him as a naughty, apple-stealing lad from St. Mary Meade and here he is, all grown up and a police inspector, no less.
John Hannah’s character becomes even more important at the end of the movie because the screenwriter decided that Lucy shouldn’t choose between Cedric Crackenthorpe and Bryan Eastley as in the novel. No, this completely made-up character steals her heart and there’s no guessing about it, unlike the novel where Miss Marple knows who Lucy chooses but she refuses to say.
Other changes made: The date was moved to an earlier time. The movie takes place at the end of 1951 (or thereabouts), but the novel was published in 1957. It wasn’t noticeable. Here’s a noticeable set of changes: Harold Crackenthorpe’s wife becomes a character. Harold doesn’t get murdered. Harold becomes far more of a rotter than he was in the novel, since in addition to being a shady financier, he’s also a lecher and a rapist. I believe Harold didn’t get murdered in the film as it demonstrated what a big-hearted guy our murderer was, not offing an obvious cad who deserved it.
A very noticeable change was having the murderer’s motivations becoming almost noble. He murders only two people instead of three and he does it all for love. Well, no. Not really. He does it because of the money. He wants to marry money and if various members of the Crackenthorpe family die (as in the novel), there’s more money left to be divided between the survivors.
We actually have to witness Miss Marple telling Emma Crackenthorpe that it was love on the murderer’s part causing him to strangle a woman in cold blood. Gag. I have no idea where the scriptwriter’s head was because Miss Marple has never excused murder before. Miss Marple’s statement echoes various characters telling each other that love is all that matters. I can’t agree because behavior matters, too, and the Crackenthorpe family may believe in love, blather on about love, but they sure don’t act like they love each other.
Something else that threw me out of the film was the scene when the murderer is identified. Miss Marple was eating fishpaste sandwiches (sounds disgusting, doesn’t it: pureed tuna) in the train compartment with five other people. She pretends to choke on a fishbone, the shade whips up, and Mrs. McGillicuddy in the car on the next track recognizes the murderer. Except Mrs. McGillicuddy was on another train in a similar situation to her original sighting of a murder being committed. Then people in both train compartments pull some sort of magic chain that make both entire trains stop!
Really? Really? I don’t know which element seemed more unrealistic. That they could successfully reenact the strangulation scene for Mrs. McGillicuddy using trains that pass in the night or that any railway in the entire world would ever allow the passengers anywhere near the brakes for the whole train. Other trains run on the same tracks, too, you know, and if passengers start pulling the magic chain emergency brake, you’re going to get trains rear-ending each other, accompanied by trainloads of costly damage, injuries, death, and lawsuits.
I looked up the scene in the novel and Agatha did not write anything so foolish as trains that pass in the night and magic chain emergency brakes. Once was enough for the novel, getting the story in motion. Instead, the identification of the murderer takes place over tea in the dining room and it is far, far more realistic (as these things go).
What finally killed the movie for me, besides Miss Marple saying that it was all for lurve, was I could not tell from the action on the screen how she knew. Subtitles would have definitely helped here as I couldn’t always understand what everyone was saying. But I don’t think so. The novel isn’t clear how Miss Marple worked out the identity of the murderer, either. It’s like it came to her in a dream and she ran with it and got lucky.
I can’t accept that copout. Not all of Agatha’s efforts were stellar and this lack of explanation isn’t typical. Even Homer nods on occasion. This moment was the scriptwriter’s chance to shine. They could have added a scene or two showing us how Miss Marple solved the crime. I’m sure they could have come up with something clever that would fit into the text, something that wouldn’t be as egregious and flat-out wrong as making Miss Marple a party to adultery when she was young and pretty.
Luckily, we did not get subjected to that little bit of whimsy again; Miss Marple staring longingly at a sepia-toned photograph of a handsome young soldier to inform the audience that’s why she remained a spinster.
What can you do? If ITV Productions ever releases this episode with subtitles, I’ll probably watch it again to see if I’m wrong about the scriptwriter. I’d like to be because I’d like to believe that Miss Marple doesn’t rely on dreams to direct her sleuthing.
