Teresa Reviews 4.50 from Paddington (2018)

Teresa reviews 4.50 from Paddington (2018), the Japanese TV movie version, and thought it was a faithful adaptation with a youthened Miss Marple.

Known in Japan as Paddington Hatsu 4ji 50pun: Shindai Tokkyuu Satsushin Jiken.

(Bill here: I’m sorry this is kinda truncated. We’ve been working hard this past week on getting the book finished — it’s almost done! I promise — but we have a number of Japanese Christie movies to go through in the coming weeks, so this is a taste of what you can expect in the international edition!)

(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 4½ stranglers

Very faithful, considering Paddington has become a modern-day Japanese police procedural with Miss Marple a younger former detective instead of a harmless old lady.

Quality of movie: 4½ stranglers

I’d have liked more time with the Tomizawa family and a better explanation of why Dr. Saeki potentially poisoned the entire family.

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

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

We have another winner! It’s quite different from the other four adaptations I’ve seen. Yet, despite updating the story to modern-day Japan and transforming Miss Marple from an elderly spinster to a retired policewoman who’s now a top crime consultant and adding a police procedural (because our heroine was a detective herself and still has connections), you’ll recognize every plot twist. If anything, this version made Dr. Quimper more evil and fixed an important plot point that would never work in a real courtroom.

So. Let’s take a ride on the Chichubu railway in a country that understands the importance of well-run passenger trains that treat its riders decently and not like cattle who should be disregarded in favor of freight which doesn’t complain.

Oh wait. That’s the nicely worded response that elderly Amano Suzume (Elspeth McGuillicuddy) got when she reported seeing a woman being strangled on an adjacent train. The conductor was very politely dismissive. She must have dreamed it, based on the overly dramatic mystery she was reading. The railway police investigated, but didn’t take her seriously. The local police were equally dismissive because no body was found alongside the tracks. They looked, but only in the most cursory of fashion and just enough to say they did. Old ladies, even ones who can afford to ride in first class, can be ignored.

But this old lady happens to be the mother-in-law of one of Japan’s former top policewomen, Amano Toko (Miss Marple). Amano Toko is very close to her beloved mother-in-law, Amano Suzume. Her mother-in-law wouldn’t make up such a ridiculous story and that it hurt her deeply to have the railway officials dismiss her as a tiresome old biddy.

There’s a little backing and forthing in the opening scenes among Suzume on the train, Toko recreating the crime on another train, and the police talking about Toko, but you’ll quickly sort out who’s who. And, it’s logical! The police are concerned because they know Amano Toko by reputation.

But she’s got to be wrong because no body was found. They arrange to watch her closely to figure out if she’s working on some bizarre publicity stunt.

But Amano Toko doesn’t do publicity stunts. What she does is ride on the murderer’s train in the same compartment while her mother-in-law and a close friend, super housekeeper Nakamura Aya (Lucy Eyelesbarrow) ride in the same seats that Amano Suzume rode in when she saw the strangulation. It’s easy to duplicate the experience on a railway system with trains that run on a regular, frequent schedule. Leaning out of the train’s window, Amano Toko proves to her satisfaction that her mother-in-law could easily see into the critical compartment. She’s irritated when she’s yanked back in by Sergeant Suzuki. He seems to think she’ll be hurt opening the window and besides, she’s wasting precious police time.

Knowing that the police and the railway think her mother-in-law is crazy, she, her mother-in-law, and Nakamura Aya move on to phase two: studying maps and timetables to figure out where the body might have gone. As Amano Toko suspects, there’s a big embankment leading into a huge, remote, wooded area. It’s the kind of place that’s difficult to search. It’s also the estate of the Tomizawa family, famous for their bakery treats sold in grocery stores throughout Japan. The family is wealthy, important, and won’t appreciate some publicity hound ex-policewoman claiming they’ve got a body on their estate.

What to do, what to do. But the answer is easy. Wealthy families headed by difficult and cantankerous patriarchs always need domestic help because no one stays for long. And so it proves. Nakamura Aya, super-housekeeper, arrives. Can she work for the Tomizawa family? She’s willing to work cheap because her ailing aunt lives in a nearby village and needs regular visiting. Indeed she can. Tomizawa Keiko (Emma Crackenthorpe) is thrilled to have a new housekeeper arrive just as the old one is leaving in a huff.

Her father, Tomizawa Shinsuke (Luther Crackenthorpe) is rude, cheap, irritating, and would be handsy with his pretty new housekeeper if he could get away with it. Nakamura Aya proves why she’s such a super-housekeeper. She keeps Tomizawa Shinsuke at bay while competently running the household. As in the novel, she does the detecting while Amano Toko waits in a nearby hotel room, only a cellphone call away.

As expected, she and the boys — Furukawa Shinji (Alexander Eastley) and Gen-Kon Kimura (James Stoddard-West) — discover an outbuilding stuffed with junk, including a sarcophagus. And what’s inside it? The body of the woman Amano Suzume saw being strangled on the train.

This is followed by a very funny (and very Japanese) scene where the head of the railway police apologizes profusely for not believing the old lady and then asks why the police didn’t do their job either.

Meanwhile, back at the Tomizawa mansion, Dr. Saeki Keiichi (Dr. Quimper) attends to Tomizawa Shinsuke. When he’s not hovering over the old man, he’s making eyes at Tomizawa Keiko. Their relationship is gentle, wistful, full of longing glances and (most likely) torrid diary entries saying everything neither of them can say to each other.

When the body is discovered, the rest of the Tomizawa family arrive. The oldest son (Edmond Crackenthorpe) died long ago under mysterious circumstances in Shanghai. But Tomizawa Shirou (Alfred Crackenthorpe) appears. He’s already on the police radar for misbehavior. Failed artist Tetsuji (Cedric) walks in and is openly dad’s favorite. Siezou (Harold) shows up too. You’ll sometimes see Furukawa Shin (Brian Eastley) but his part, like his brothers-in-law, was written into almost nothing to make room for the police procedural.

At dinner very soon afterwards, ramping up the tension, Shirou wolfs down his soup before the others and dies. Nakamura Aya suspects poison and prevents everyone else from eating the soup. This was odd because Dr. Saeki poisoned the soup but was he planning to murder everyone? Including Keiko? That didn’t make sense and the way the scene played out, no one else got sick, giving him a chance to murder Shirou under the pretense of treating him.

Meanwhile, the dead woman is tentatively identified as Zhang Meili (Martine), the lost Chinese lover of the dead oldest son. Keiko unearths a picture of her brother and Zhang Meili and confirms that she’d received a letter and had gone to meet Zhang Meili at the hotel.

But Zhang Meili never showed, presumably because she’d been murdered and stuffed into the sarcophagus. Interestingly, Amano Toko gets the picture and shows it to her mother-in-law. She insisted that the woman in the photo is not the woman she saw being strangled. She’ll never forget her face nor the tall man, seen only from the back, strangling her. Whoever the dead woman is, she can’t be Zhang Meili. Amano Toko chooses to believe her mother-in-law and is later proved right.

But who could it be? Further thought and investigation leads to the conclusion you expect. It must be someone who’s close to the family and knows the estate well.

At the climax, Amano Toko and Amano Suzume arrive to meet Nakamura Aya and are invited to tea. Fish paste sandwiches are served. Amano Toko chokes, and Amano Suzume IDs the doctor as the strangler.

It’s when walking away afterwards that Amano Toko proves what a good policewoman she was. She knew her mother-in-law’s ID from the back wouldn’t hold up in court so she was ready to keep her from saying anything to that effect. With a good suspect, police legwork would do the rest: finding the connection between the doctor and the now correctly identified victim. It was his hated wife who stood in the way of him marrying sweet, rich Tomizawa Keiko.