Teresa Reviews “A Caribbean Mystery” (2013): Miss Marple Do That Voodoo So Well

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This week we reviewed TWO versions of “A Caribbean Mystery.” Click here to read about the Joan Hickson version.

Fidelity to text: 4 poison bottles.
Unusual for an ITV production, this version actually follows Agatha’s storyline. You’ll get the usual removal or consolidation of minor characters. Adding Ian Fleming and James Bond (the ornithologist) was a minor change. Mama Zogbe was a more significant addition but she worked perfectly and inserted a terrific zombie/voodoo element. Canon Prescott got youthened and a happy ending.

Quality of movie on its own: 5 poison bottles.
Every part of the movie worked from start to finish. Settings, local color, great acting, interactions between staff and guests, Miss Marple having a real mystery to chew on; you won’t find anything wrong with this version of A Caribbean Mystery. And you get voodoo! Very appropriate for a movie set in the Caribbean.

Since Miss Marple gets around, it’s no surprise when she arrives in the sunny Caribbean, courtesy of devoted nephew, Raymond West, and his profitable career as a literary novelist. It occurs to me that Agatha had a lot of fun with Raymond West. He got respect from the literary establishment unlike Christie or her alter-ego, mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver. Miss Marple, however, didn’t think much of Raymond’s novels. More amusingly, Raymond’s writing paid extremely well, something that might have been marginally possible back in England in the 1950s and would be impossible today. Today, literary novelists are at the bottom of the heap in terms of making money at writing, whereas hack genre writers can write full-time, pay the bills, and afford nice vacations. Their bank respects them even if the literary world does not.

But I digress. I’m still amazed at how well Cape Town, South Africa, stood in for a sunny Caribbean island back in the 1950s. You shouldn’t be surprised by the coconut palms. They prefer oceanside living (like successful hack genre writers), their coconuts drop into the sea, are carried by the currents and thus you can find coconut palms everywhere in the world where the climate is even the slightest bit warm enough. Even so, you would never guess where this movie was filmed if they didn’t admit it. Many of the actors were fresh faces (at least to me) and that was nice too; I didn’t get mixed up confusing what I was watching with a different character in another movie.

Once at the Golden Palms hotel, Miss Marple proceeds to be moderately bored by her calm and sunny vacation until, as luck would have it, Major Palgrave tells her a boring story about murderers he has known. Unlike most people, Miss Marple is not bored since she’s met many murderers. This vacation has suddenly gotten interesting. It gets more interesting when Major Palgrave clams up and hastily changes the subject of murderers he has known, followed by him dying that night under suspicious circumstances.

She’s off to the races, meeting the wealthy Mr. Rafiel and persuading him to listen when no one else does, including the police.

Because ITV filmed the Miss Marple novels out of sequence, Nemesis was released in January of 2009, four years prior to this film. In reality, Agatha wrote that novel as a sequel to A Caribbean Mystery and in it, Mr. Rafiel asks Miss Marple to solve a personal mystery of his own. He was very impressed with her sleuthing and sense of justice in A Caribbean Mystery. The two ITV productions should be considered as independent films since they’ve got nothing to do with each other. ITV hired two different actors to portray Mr. Rafiel to make sure you, dear viewer, don’t connect the two stories.

The situation heats up at the Golden Palms when the hotelkeeper, Molly, starts showing signs of insanity. Then add the voodoo dance done for the tourists and wow! Things get hotter. The voodoo tourist dance reminded me of similar tourist productions in Hawaii (I was stationed there for three years). I got the same sensation that what tourists pay to see has little to do with what the natives do in private.

It’s flashy, it’s showy, it’s dramatic, and has little to do with actual cultural practices or religion which are not for public consumption. When Miss Marple visits Mama Zogbe she confirms this fact.

Miss Marple found a gris-gris doll in the shrubbery and wanted to know if it meant anything. According to Mama Zogbe, it meant nothing. She showed off a box full of them, made for the tourists to buy and take home with them to illustrate their stories about their exotic Caribbean vacation.

Later on, Mama Zogbe reveals that sometimes voodoo — when it’s not being used to harvest tourist dollars — is real. She sold Canon Prescott a voodoo charm. He, despite being an Anglican minister, was desperate enough to use a heathen religious system to help him stay on the straight and narrow. Canon Prescott is a godly man, so he knows occult power when he sees it.

Red herrings abound, including the weird dynamics between Lucky and Greg Dyson and Colonel and Evelyn Hillingdon. Watch Evelyn’s face. She’s saddled with a poor excuse for a husband who’s unable to see the value in what he has. Her scene with him, when he accuses her that she’s never loved anyone, is priceless. It demonstrates how obtuse he is and makes the viewer wonder if he’ll ever recognize he got lucky.

Then there’s the weirdness between Esther Walters and Tim Kendall, Molly’s oh-so-devoted husband. For a hotel guest, Esther is awfully fond of her hotelkeeper.

I particularly appreciated the scenes with Victoria and Errol. They’re part of the staff at the hotel. You get a reminder of how much make-believe is involved in tropical resort vacations and how much poverty there is behind the lush vegetation. Victoria needed the money. Don’t forget that when you watch and rewatch this episode to catch all the great bits. Remember it when you go on your vacation so you tip your chambermaid. Those women work hard for their money.

I would be remiss in not mentioning Ian Fleming, would-be novelist. He shows up briefly, looking for the blandest name possible for his new spy hero and finds it in the name of an ornithologist, James Bond. That’s a true story, by the way. James Bond specialized in birds of the Caribbean and wrote the definitive book on them: Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming met him, liked his name, and the rest is spy-novel history. They play no part in A Caribbean Mystery, other than to add a frisson of reality nicely.

The ending pulls everything together very nicely. Just like Agatha wrote it, our hotelkeepers have a more complex background than they admit to. The last few scenes make you wonder what happens next. Not everyone gets their happy ending. Watch Greg Dyson sitting at the bar with Esther Walters. Watch Esther as she realizes what a complete and utter fool she was and how close she came to dying herself a few years down the road. Then watch a flash of a happier future for Canon Prescott and the girl of his dreams.

What a great film. Don’t miss it.

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