Teresa Reviews “Agatha and the Midnight Murders” (2020)

Teresa reviews “Agatha and the Midnight Murders” (2020) and discovers a missed opportunity for a taut, gripping thriller.

Fidelity to life: 2 hatchet jobs

Agatha was in London during the Blitz, she endured unending problems with Internal Revenue, and she needed money.

Quality of film on its own: 2 hatchet jobs

This flick needs to be remade. There’s a tight, tense, suspenseful, closed-circle mystery in there waiting to see the light of day. This isn’t it.

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

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.
Was there anything real here? Besides in some parallel universe where Agatha Christie changed faces every few years?

Glad you asked. Agatha really lived in London during the Blitz. Her hubby Max was in North Africa contributing to the war effort. She worked in the University College Hospital’s pharmacy when she wasn’t writing. It’s possible that Max cheated on her during their five-year separation.

She had major problems with Inland Revenue (British taxes) and the Internal Revenue Service (American taxes) that bedeviled her for decades. Both agencies wanted to pay taxes on her overseas royalties. The rules over how much changed depending on who she spoke to and how much money the Crown needed. In the 1960s, the Crown took 89 percent of her income beyond £15,000. She contemplated filing for bankruptcy and cut back on her writing to avoid taxation problems.

One of her books drew the attention of MI5. Her Tommy and Tuppence novel N or M? (1941), a spy thriller set in the early days of WWII, a character was named Major Bletchley. MI5 got involved because a highly top-secret code-breaking operation took place at Bletchley Park and they needed to know if there was a leak. Agatha used the name because of an annoying wait while on a train outside Bletchley.

Because she feared dying in the Blitz and leaving her family without a source of income, she wrote two novels that she kept as insurance. Since she lived, they weren’t published until the end of her life: Curtain (1975) and Sleeping Murder (1976). She had a love/hate relationship with Hercule Poirot and killed him in Curtain so it would have been the last Poirot novel.

During the Blitz, the streets were patrolled by Air Raid Wardens. The sirens sounded, warning of incoming bombers. The wardens shooed everyone into underground shelters such as tube stations to cellars. Then, the citizens waited until the all clear, keeping their spirits up. Everyone knew the words to popular songs like “Hitler’s only got one ball.” About 40,000 civilians died during the Blitz, with tens of thousands more injured so most people didn’t argue about seeking shelter.

By 1940, Agatha had fans worldwide. She’d been translated into multiple languages. It’s plausible she had Chinese fans. It’s very likely a major collector/fan with deep pockets would pay well for a new Poirot novel they could control.

It’s very implausible that Agatha was so desperate for money that she’d sell her unpublished manuscript of Curtain to some skeevy buyer under the table and pocket the cash. The idea of a deed to go with the manuscript, giving the owner publication rights, didn’t make any sense. Deeds are for property, not unpublished books. It that was actually a legal requirement, it needed to be spelled out in the script better.

In fact, everything in the script needed to be spelled out better. There’s a cracking good mystery buried under bad writing, static direction, and indifferent acting.

Too many scenes went nowhere, starting with the opening. An Air Raid Warden is searching the rubble (alone?) for victims. When one is found partially buried, the Warden doesn’t save the victim. No, he cuts off the victim’s finger to steal a diamond ring. Then, we never see anything about this Warden again! Why even have this scene?

It should have gone like this: Agatha reads the paper and learns to her horror that someone is robbing and mutilating Blitz victims. This gives her another compelling reason to hire Travis Pickford as her bodyguard when she visits a skeevy part of London to sell the manuscript.

Then later on, that Warden should reappear in the film! As it was, the maiming Warden could have been PC O’Hanauer or Travis Pickford or someone else entirely. If the knife was supposed to be a clue, it didn’t work.

Travis Pickford was another problem. If you recall Agatha and the Truth of Murder (2018), he was one of six suspects in the murder of Florence Nightingale Shore. He was innocent of that crime but he’s not an innocent man. He’s known to the police and regularly assists them in their inquiries. Why wasn’t there a scene to help the audience remember him and understand why Agatha, out of all the people she knows, choose him as a bodyguard? Two full years passed between the airing of that movie and this one. Audiences forget.

How could Agatha sort of recognize the two American tourists, Audrey and Nell? She was wary of them but for no discernable reason. At the climax, it turns out they’re from MI5 and not from Inland Revenue. They don’t care about Agatha evading taxes but they do care about the Bletchley character in her spy novel. Yet Agatha doesn’t tell them (and the audience) why she chose that name. Worse, if Agatha’s afraid of being followed to the low-rent hotel where she’s selling her manuscript for untaxable $$, then we should have seen scenes of her looking over her shoulder at teashops, on buses, and in the tube.

Audrey and Nell, MI5 agents in disguise, also, apparently knew Sir Malcolm Campbell. They exchange some very unclear banter implying … well, something about disloyalty, royalty, betrayal, and what good citizens do when England’s under attack. If you’re going to add a proto-James Bond to your cast, make full use of him! And why did he have the bimbo on his arm? And what was he doing in that skeevy hotel in the first place?

Why was Eli, the mobster owner of the hotel, concerned about everyone going down into his cellar during the bombing raid? One of the characters said it must be because black market goods were being stored down there. Yet when everyone trooped downstairs to avoid being blown to bits, the cellar (huge and laid out like a catacomb) was being used to store old furniture and knickknacks.

How did Agatha find Frankie Lei, wealthy and unscrupulous superfan from Hong Kong in the first place? And why did she feel forced to meet him in a skeevy hotel when she could have just as easily handed him the manuscript and he hand her the envelope of cash while enjoying afternoon tea at the Ritz? We need a reason and there was none.

When Rocco (Frankie Lei’s bodyguard) backhanded Clarence the bartender, he fell to the floor. Okay. But why, when his body was examined later, did his face look like it had been bashed in to silence him?

Why was Jun Yuhuan, Frankie Lei’s translator, murdered? There was no reason. Similarly, there was no reason for Eli the mobster to get knifed in the eye. Did either of them know something about the connections between this assorted pack of strangers? If they did, the script didn’t bother telling us.

In fact, the script didn’t bother introducing us to any of the people in the hotel bar.

And why did they use yet another actress for Agatha? That made the least sense of all.