Teresa Reviews A Murder Is Announced (2015)

Teresa Reviews A Murder Is Announced (2015), a.k.a. Murder Party from Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie and found its horsing around a little difficult to believe.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 2½ handguns
The core idea remains, even after subtracting most of the villagers, rewriting the sisters’ relationship, and shoehorning in our leads.

Quality of film: 2½ handguns
The film works best when our leads are offscreen. When they come onstage, it frequently devolves into a junior high school version of I Love Lucy.

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In order to give our leads something to do, much of the complexity of A Murder Is Announced is jettisoned. Mitzi the housekeeper is gone, along with the workers running the château/horse ranch. You see the occasional person riding in the background but other than Philippine (Phillipa Haymes), it looks like there are zero servants or gardeners or grooms or ostlers or stablehands of any kind maintaining the château, outbuildings, stables, horses, miles of fences, acres of lawn, gardens, paddocks, and pastures.

Similarly, Colonel Easterbrook and his mysterious, much younger blonde hottie wife are gone as are the Swettenhams. Thus, Philippine doesn’t get her happy ending with an Edmund facsimile; instead, she gets hit on by Marcel (Patrick Simmons) despite him being there with his stealth girlfriend posing as his sister, Antoinette (Julia Simmons). Antionette gets a different reason for infiltrating the château, but it works with the overall rewrite.

You’re best bet to enjoy this rehash is to forget Announced entirely. But if you do that, you’ll wonder why so much screentime is wasted watching Laurence pursue the hot new lady pathologist instead of learning more about Antionette’s past, driving her to infiltrate Leticia’s château / horse farm. She and Marcel are pretending to be brother and sister so how does she feel about Marcel chasing after Philippine? You could almost say she’s okay with it, because when Leticia dies, Philippine inherits it all. If Marcel marries Philippine? Well, as Greta of Endless Night would tell Mike Rogers, “Wives do die.”

But you won’t get that story. Nor will you learn anything about Marcel, supposed writer whom you’ll never see sitting down with a scrap of paper and a stub of a pencil. No wonder he’s living off one dumb woman and trying for another. He’s so shiftless you wonder what Antionette sees in him other than as protective cover to bolster her own lies about her identity.

Nor will you get a resolution of Philippine’s tragic story of falling madly in love with a man who turns out to be a criminal. (Marcel as an adult man instead of an overgrown boy, in other words.) He’s out of jail for armed robbery and wants money. What is she going to do? She’s still married to him, and they’ve got a young son. Will she inherit right after the climax as Leticia instructed in her will? You won’t learn. Her story just ends so you can watch Marlène and Avril yuck it up about Laurence’s unrequited passion for the lady pathologist who turns out to be married.

Leticia, it turns out, wasn’t merely her tycoon boss’ hyper-capable secretary. She was also his lover. One in a string, apparently as the boss had no wife and we learn about at least one other high-maintenance fling who possibly bore the boss’ illegitimate daughter. The girl turns out to be Antionette who has legitimate grievances but alas, spends all her time sunbathing and providing fan service to the men around her.

And some women too, based on watching Mlle. Greenblat (Miss Hinchcliffe) who might be living with Henriette (Amy Murgatroyd) but still has an eye for young hotties. She certainly can’t take her eyes off Marlène, who wants basic secretarial instruction to become a more efficient office worker. You’ll get hints of a backstory for Henriette but nothing for Mlle. Greenblat, even about how they met or ended up in a backwater like Lille. Of course, the novel doesn’t tell you anything about their pasts, either. Just that they’re a couple. But you know? I never got the impression that Miss Hinchcliffe would cheat on Murgatroyd. Ever. I get the distinct impression that Mlle. Greenblat would cheat on Henriette.

I guess this is a French TV thing, because there’s even more cheating and adultery in their Agatha adaptations than she put in her novels, which is saying something.

I would have enjoyed watching more of their relationship because they’re so different. More about Mlle. Greenblat and Henriette would have also explained why she stole Leticia’s letter from Argentinian relatives other than the plot told her too. It’s Odette (Dora Bunner) who gets accused of petty thefts. Not Henriette. Yet there’s Henriette, sifting through Leticia’s mail looking for the one, plot-critical letter that can later be passed on to Laurence.

Since the film’s set in Lille in the late 1950s there’s also the question of why — when there was a newspaper advert about the murder party which Marlène reads aloud to us and everyone on the bus — no one else shows up other than the residents of the château and Mlle. Greenblat and Henriette. The novel has many neighbors reading the advert and arriving, eager for fun. It also implies, subtly, why no one else showed up. Everyone at Leticia Blacklock’s party was from somewhere else. The real gentry of the village weren’t about to go slumming with strangers and the working-class folks had their own evening amusements. I don’t know if that would be true in Lille. It didn’t ring true the way it did in the novel.

On the other hand, simplifying the plot gave us more time to watch Avril wallow in despair over ignoring Josette (Myrna Harris) at the newspaper in favor of scoring points on Laurence, resulting in Josette’s murder. Josette’s added murder compensates for Henriette’s almost murder. She’s strangled with a pair of stockings while pinning up laundry but Avril arrives in time to scare off the murderer and save her life by giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After a lesbian joke, of course.

Expect some coarse humor, particularly about the stallion, Flash. It’s to add to the junior high atmosphere, I suppose. I didn’t care for it.

I really didn’t care for the ending. This Leticia turns out — naturally — to be her disfigured sister, Charlotte. In the novel, Leticia and Charlotte were dear friends as well as sisters and as soon as Leticia could, she quit her job to take care of Charlotte and get her the goiter surgery she needed.

Here, Leticia and Charlotte remain sisters but this Charlotte hated and resented her successful, competent, go-getting sister. She must have done a good job hiding her loathing because you’ll see a scene of Laurence and Avril reading stacks of letters between the sisters hunting for clues. This Charlotte is horse-mad, explaining why, when she stole her sister’s identity and inheritance, she bought a stud farm.

She adores her new stallion, Flash, to the point of sleeping with the horse in the stall. That is actually doable but only if you and the horse are already fully bonded. Don’t try it with a horse you don’t know extremely well who also likes you.

When her schemes come undone, this Charlotte proves how crazy she is. She’s not content with murdering Kurt, Josette, Odette, and strangling Henriette. She murders Flash and then commits suicide with a stolen policeman’s pistol.

She kills the horse! Be prepared, because it’s a shock. If she can’t own Flash, then no one can. And then it’s back to hijinks at the junior high. Yeek.