Teresa Reviews 4.50 from Paddington (2008)

Teresa reviews 4.50 from Paddington (2008), a.k.a. the French Le Crime Est Notre Affaire (Crime Is Our Business) featuring Tommy and Tuppence, and loves its attention to the devastating effect of murder.

Fidelity to text: 3 1/2 stranglers

It’s remarkably true to the text considering that a French Tommy and Tuppence fill in for Miss Marple and Mr. Stringer.

Quality of film: 4 stranglers

This is fun and frothy, and contains genuine laughs even if their butterfly nomenclature is wrong.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

This is the second Pascal Thomas film involving Tommy and Tuppence. This time, he chose to adapt a Miss Marple novel: The 4.50 from Paddington. This isn’t as odd as it seems because the property he was really adapting was the Margaret Rutherford version of Paddington that was renamed Murder, She Said (1961).

How is this possible? Because Tommy takes the role of Mr. Stringer, Margaret Rutherford’s real-life husband and costar in all four of her Miss Marple films and her cameo in The Alphabet Murders (1965).

Similarly, in that film Margaret Rutherford dispenses with Lucy Eyelesbarrow. She infiltrates the Crackenthorpe mansion as a housemaid and performs the snooping and detecting herself.

And thus we have Tommy and Tuppence — or I should say Bélisaire and Prudence Beresford — taking on the investigation of the murder that Prudence’s aunt saw while riding on the train. Babette Boutiti is a good clone of Mrs. McGillicuddy. She knows darn well what she saw, despite what the conductor thinks. As a scientist, she’s a trained observer. She noticed the strangler’s build, the victim’s red gloves, and where the train was. But was there a body? There was not.

Babette’s on her way to the rainforests of Guyana to catch rare and elusive butterflies, so she can’t stick around and investigate the murder. She knows what’s more important! If you’ve ever gone on a field trip to Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa., during their annual early July outings on the artillery fields to gawk at regal fritillaries, you’ll understand. If you do this and I have, remember to stay on the approved paths and never pick up anything metal.

Prudence is eager to take on the task. She’s bored and needing something to do to escape the imminent visit of her daughter, son-in-law, and noisy twin grandsons.

She gets out her collection of topographical maps and works out, based on Babette’s information, where to start looking for a woman’s red-gloved body. Bélisaire, like Mr. Stringer before him, is dubious. But since he’s got a meeting in Scotland, he leaves Prudence to her own devices, assuming that she’ll be a dutiful grand-mère and welcome their visiting family.

Prudence sees off Bélisaire at the train station. In one of the funniest scenes in the movie, the kilt-clad Bélisaire reenacts Marilyn Monroe’s scene from The Seven Year Itch (1955), although he isn’t nearly as blasé about showing off his nethers as she was.

For her part, Prudence immediately abandons the château and heads off into the wintery weather to the potential scene of the crime. One of the oddities of this film is seeing real snow in a French winter and then, suddenly, depending on where someone is, there’s no snow. It looks like late summer. France must have an extremely varied climate.

Anyway, Prudence discovers how to infiltrate the possible scene of the crime via one of the classic tropes. She’s sitting at the pub and overhears the locals gossip about how the latest maid from the Charpentier estate has quit and is waiting outside for a bus — in the snow — that won’t come for hours. What an opportunity! Prudence rescues the housemaid and while delivering her to her destination, gets all the information she could want about the château. It’s named Valley of the Wolves. There is a pack of wolves, but they’re abstract statues arranged artfully around a pond. It’s implied but never stated that they’re the handiwork of Augustin Charpentier. This Augustin is a sculptor, not a painter, but he’s given it up to kill animals.

The Charpentier château is woefully understaffed, so Emma takes Prudence on at once as a cook and housemaid. Every adaptation I’ve seen of 4.50 from Paddington plays up the severe servant shortage and how readily the quality accept anyone who looks reasonable rather than cook their own meals and scrub their own toilets.

Once safely inside, Prudence charms Alexie (a gender-swapped Alexander Eastley) and Alexie’s friend, Valérie (a gender-swapped James Stoddart-West).

This Charpentier household rearranges the Crackenthorpe brothers. Raphaël and Augustin take on aspects of Alfred, Harold, and Cedric Crackenthorpe. Bryan Eastley becomes the third Crackenthorpe brother, Frédéric, a widower. And it works. As in the novel, they’re at odds over money and they all loathe their patriarch, Roderick.

Roderick Charpentier is even more repellent than usual. When two of his sons are murdered, he’s glad! Glad, I tell you. Plus, his table manners are terrible, he rules the household with an iron fist, and he doesn’t hesitate to harass Prudence. It’s hard to understand why Emma loves her awful father when Raphaël and Augustin would be happy to see him die. Frédéric is more passive, but he’s no fan of dad either.

And of course, there’s le docteur François Legarde. He’s watching everyone’s health and courting Emma. We see them being passionate with each other. It’s clear they love each other. He’s the one Emma turns to about the Martina problem. Should she tell the police about the letter from her dead brother’s girlfriend? Dr. Legarde encourages her to do the right thing when her brothers would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. This adaption addresses the complicated subplot of Edmund marrying Martina, then dying tragically. But did they marry? And why didn’t Martina contact them? Especially if she was pregnant with Edmund’s son? That would make him a Charpentier heir, subdividing the inheritance still further.

Events proceed pretty much in line with the novel, with added dream sequences for both Prudence and Bélisaire.

Like Mr. Stringer, he has an important role to play. After Prudence finds the body of a strangled woman in a sarcophagus wearing a single red glove, he shows up at the château as a police investigator. Can they admit they know each other? They cannot, leading to more funny business, especially when he realizes she abandoned the family to play detective.

One of the best parts of this adaptation is Emma and her doctor. You know they care deeply about each other. That’s why the ending — which does something I haven’t seen before — is all the more shocking. Emma learns the truth about the doctor. He wasn’t a widower like he claimed. Once he heard the Martina story she innocently told him, he planned his escape from his unwanted ex-wife. He’d be free to marry Emma and eventually inherit all that lovely money.

He poisoned the guests at dinner. He murdered two of her brothers. He strangled his wife and hid her body in the sarcophagus.

Emma is devastated when she learns the truth. Every other version omits this scene, as did the novel, leaving the reader to wonder if she cared very much. This Emma does. The man she loves and planned to marry was a murderer. Her dream of a happy future was shattered. This kind of scene should be included more often in films. We rarely see the devastation murder leaves in its wake. Lives are permanently altered.

But even with this grief, the film ends on a high note with a Sherlock Holmes joke. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s a great one and shows who’s the smarter half of Bélisaire and Prudence Beresford.