Teresa Reviews “Agatha” (1979)

Fidelity to real life: 1 hatchet job

Archie had an affair with Nancy Neele, Agatha disappeared in Harrogate for 11 days, the Christies divorced two years later, and Archie married Nancy afterwards. Everything else? Fiction.

Quality of movie on its own: 1 hatchet job

But only because the settings, costumes, and a period health spa are interesting in their own right.

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

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

This film was an hour and forty-five minutes long. As you endure each blah moment, you’ll think longingly of big slabs of rhubarb pie. Why rhubarb? Because, as Garrison Keillor will tell you, nothing takes the taste of shame and humiliation out of your mouth like rhubarb pie.

This dreary hatchet job was inflicted on not just the audience, but upon the Christie family. Agatha was a famously private person. She would have been mortified by the producers dredging up the most painful event of her past as entertainment. She would have been appalled by how badly scripted the fictitious rewrite was. She would have been horrified at how they turned what should have been intriguing into a slog across the wintry moors through knee-deep mud.

Folks, if you’re going to rewrite someone’s past to make a movie, make it interesting. Make it exciting. Make it plausible. Don’t make it tedious or tiresome. Adding gratuitous nudity (including Agatha!) does not compensate for a bad script and cardboard actors. I know the setting was a health spa, but there would have been towels, slippers, capacious robes. The story takes place in Yorkshire in December! England is not known for decent central heating, and it must have been freezing in 1926, yet the director ogles the flesh on display.

Not male flesh, by the way, but why do I expect any different? As long as I’m ranting about gratuitous nudity supposedly presented for artistic reasons, why were all the ladies on display young and firm? This is a health spa! Most of the ladies would have been old and sagging. That tells you right there that the director wanted to leer at his actresses.

Our titular star is Vanessa Redgrave. Dorothy Parker said Katharine Hepburn ranged the gamut of human emotions from A to B. Vanessa Redgrave didn’t make it to B. She popped her eyes and behaved like a woebegone sheep out on the moors. With each camera close-up, I was mesmerized by her blue eyeshadow, heavy mascara, and eyebrow pencil. I didn’t know that ladies in 1926 wore that much eye makeup at health spas, but okay. I couldn’t understand why Archie married her in the first place.

Archie was conducting a torrid affair with his secretary, Nancy Neele, and I don’t know why he did that either, based on what we saw onscreen. Nancy was a cypher, with virtually no lines. Nancy was also, according to the dialog I could understand, fat. Nancy had to go to the expensive health spa in Yorkshire to lose weight. The woman looked like a toothpick! If the script claims a woman needs to lose weight, don’t cast an actress who needs to gain some to look normal. I also don’t grasp what a secretary’s weight has to do with her secretarial duties, but the hack scriptwriter had to get Agatha and Nancy together at the health spa, away from prying eyes so they could take off their clothes.

A side note: I love subtitles. They keep me from missing clever dialog or plot points. Subtitles wouldn’t have helped this movie. There were no clever lines and the plot points ranged from poorly thought-out to wildly implausible.

Our other star was Dustin Hoffman. He was stiff and uncomfortable, perfectly understandable considering his role. He played the smarmy American reporter who meets Agatha, falls in love with Agatha, rescues Agatha from certain death, and then nobly sails back across the Atlantic, never to reveal Agatha’ secret plot to get Archie’s secretary to murder her.

Did Agatha meet any American reporters in that health spa? She did not. Would any reporter worth his salary sit on the story of the century in exchange for a longing glance? As if. None of the reporters in this movie acted like reporters. Why look! There’s Archie Christie, marching around all stiff and proper. His wife’s mysteriously vanished and do the baying hounds of the press notice him? They do not. They ignore the story right in front of them! There’s Archie’s friend, Lord Brackenbury, owner of the newspaper employing Dustin Hoffman’s character. Lord Brackenbury — whose own paper is covering Agatha’s disappearance as front page news — tells Dustin not to pursue Agatha. No and I mean no newspaper owner ignores news that sends newsboys out into the street shouting “Extra! Extra!” because his friend might be embarrassed. Public embarrassment, shame, and humiliation sell newspapers!

Then there’s the health spa. Agatha settles in, takes various weird but period health treatments, and writes in her journal. She notices the electric-chair-like gadgets. Remember, she’s all weepy and mopey over Archie. Her archrival and nemesis, Nancy Neele, is also at the spa. Agatha takes copious notes and turns herself into an electrical engineer, rejiggering the components of the electric health chair so that she can put herself into the chair and have Nancy turn on the juice and electrocute her!

Yes, according to this movie, Agatha tried to force Nancy Neele to murder her via electrocution.

She’d die, Archie would be sad, Nancy (Archie’s partner in adultery) would be tried for murder, and the nice ladies at the health spa would be devastated, fired, and ruined for life. Every step of the way, movie Agatha did stupid things like leave unburnt evidence in the fireplace and devise super-convoluted plots when poison would have worked better.

Movie Agatha didn’t have a daughter, didn’t have friends other than her personal secretary, didn’t have a mother who’d just died, and didn’t have the brains that real Agatha did. Real Agatha was an expert in poisons thanks to her WWI experience working in a dispensary. Real Agatha knew perfectly well how to cover her tracks. She wrote mystery novels. She knew not to leave evidence lying around.

Real Agatha would not have gotten down on her hands and knees to pack a reporter’s perfectly ironed, over-starched, and squared-up shirts into his suitcase! Real Agatha grew up in a household where servants did that work. Even more, Real Agatha would not have slipped the incriminating manuscript into the suitcase to be discovered later by Dustin Hoffman. Why did she do that? To tell him it was okay to publish the truth that she’d tried to get the Crown to murder Archie’s fling for her? Like one of her plots? No, no, no.

Agatha was badly written, badly plotted, played fast and loose with the facts even more than biopics normally do, and the worst crime of all, was tedious. Unless you’ve got a passionate interest in health spas of the 1920s, don’t bother watching without a slab of rhubarb pie in front you. You’ll need it to get the taste of this movie out of your mouth.