Teresa Reviews “At Bertram’s Hotel” (1987): Where Crime Never Checks Out

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Fidelity to text: 3 and 1/2 guns.
Everything major is present and accounted for right up until the ending. The problem is way too much compression of the text. In addition, the time period was changed from the early 1960s to about 1953. At Bertram’s Hotel is one of those books that gains from understanding its era. Things were changing fast and Agatha commented on those changes via Miss Marple.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 guns.
The film was so compressed I had trouble following the complicated storyline. Add in unintelligible dialog (we had to replay a scene four times and I still think Miss Marple said “spoon” and not “policeman”) and you get a film that needed to be ten minutes longer to be clearer. That would have ramped up the tension too.

At Bertram’s Hotel (1965) is the next to last Miss Marple novel that Agatha wrote. The final Miss Marple novel was Nemesis, published in 1971. Sleeping Murder, while published in 1976, was written in 1941 or so. Does this matter? Yes, it does, because Miss Marple has been slowly and subtly aging. She hasn’t lost any of her mental sharpness, but her body is getting older.

She can still eavesdrop with the best of them, but she can no longer go after a murderer with weedkiller like she did in Sleeping Murder. She’s also acutely aware of the passage of time and the extensive changes wrought in England over the decades.

The story opens with Miss Marple’s arrival at Bertram’s Hotel. She’s enjoying a two-week vacation courtesy of nephew, Raymond. She’d stayed at Bertram’s as a young girl and is astonished at how unreal it all seems; almost a caricature of an Edwardian-era hotel right down to the uniformed and capped chambermaids. Bertram’s Hotel chambermaids even curtsey like an Edwardian-era servant would and a modern chambermaid would not.

There’s a reason for that behavior but since the movie compressed so much of the text, it’s almost completely lost. The movie is 110 minutes long. It needed another ten minutes or more to explain the criminal activity going on in the background that Miss Marple detects. It could have also been longer — thirty seconds here, forty-five seconds there, to explain how she knew to follow Elvira and her Italian racing car boyfriend to that seedy rock ’n’ roll diner.

There’s a great movie struggling to get out. The culture clashes alone were worth more time. A television room, because the American guests like it! Handsome Irish grooms who don’t know their place! Absentminded Canon Pennyfather who stumbles into the crime, yet the action is so truncated, we get cryptic, unintelligible telephone calls that are supposed to explain what happened and only muddied the waters.

At times, it appeared there were two totally unrelated plots competing for screen space. We have Elvira Blake and her very unsuitable boyfriend and her estranged adventuress of a mother. We also have a mysterious string of high-stakes robberies involving famous people who couldn’t have done it. Finally, we have a murder. Are the stories related?

Yes, they are, except that we didn’t see enough evidence on the screen! We got significant glances and lingering camera shots of Bertram’s exquisite high tea dessert tray and quick shots of newspaper headlines but not long enough to read and understand them. This shouldn’t have happened. The BBC could have filmed another ten minutes; a minute here, thirty seconds there, to show us how the two stories intertwined.

Moviemakers should never, ever, ever assume the audience read the book. Far more people watch TV and go to the movies than read. I’d bet that at least half the audience for the BBC production of Miss Marple have never cracked a Miss Marple novel. And this is in Great Britain, a literate, reading culture that adores Agatha Christie.

If you haven’t already read At Bertram’s Hotel, you’ll be lost. I know the storyline, and I was lost.

Excising most of the gang-of-thieves plot also ruined what could have been a very tense movie. If you recall the story (read it before viewing), Bertram’s Hotel is so nostalgic as to be unreal. That’s because it is. A gang of thieves uses it to cover their crimes. They’re running a real hotel, with real guests to camouflage the presence of fake guests who are moving stolen goods around.

But what if one of those real guests is a sharp-eyed, snoopy old lady? She behaves suspiciously, asking prying questions, lurking in odd corners and openly eavesdropping. That old lady is in for a world of hurt. Frail old ladies can easily slip and fall down a flight of stairs. An attending doctor’s first thought would not be “she was pushed.” It would be “we need better handrails and how about an elevator to prevent these tragic yet completely normal accidents?” That could have been played up. A criminal syndicate operating out of a hotel should be wary about what the guests saw. Not this bunch.

I could not figure out how Miss Marple was able to follow Elvira and the Italian boyfriend to the seedy diner. I really couldn’t figure out how Elvira and her adventuress mother were able to reconcile the Italian boyfriend since he was carrying on with both mother and daughter. I know Elvira narrowly escaped murder at gunpoint but even so. Most daughters and mothers I know don’t share their lover, and a near-death experience won’t reconcile them to doing so.

The ending in the film was expanded over that of the book. In the book, Miss Marple and the Inspector deduce who did it but they have no proof. The Inspector assures Miss Marple that the murderer won’t get away with it but we don’t know how he’ll prove his case. In the movie version, since you’ve got to have a dramatic moment when the murderer is confronted with evidence of their guilt, you get a scene involving a handkerchief sachet. A handkerchief sachet is a folded over pair of satin pockets that you stuff with your fancy, embroidered handkerchiefs. It keeps them clean and flat. It’s perfect, according to Miss Marple, for stashing illicit love letters and anything else you don’t want seen and she proves it by discovering the murderer’s diary.

This seemed weak. If a handkerchief sachet is a common place to hide things, then don’t you think that this is the first place a police inspector (or a nosy old lady) will look?

I did like Bess Sedgwick very much, right up to the ending when she crashes her car to avoid a peddler on a bicycle. Please. It was accurate to the book, but she would have run him, and peddlers on bicycles don’t survive encounters with sports cars so even though Bess wasn’t wearing a seatbelt (they didn’t have them in 1953) it’s hard to believe she would have died in the ensuing accident. Badly injured? Sure. Got away with it? Quite possible. Killed instantly? Doubt it.

Her daughter, Elvira Blake, was an interesting character, too, and clearly the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Again, the novel gave us far more material about her adventuress-in-training ways. The movie only gave us hints.

I would have liked to have seen more of that Irish groom, who became a doorman for Bertram’s Hotel. He had a complex relationship with Bess. Was that why he ran to Elvira Blake’s rescue? Or was it because he was the heroic type as well as it being his job to rescue the guests? We don’t get those answers. I don’t believe he was part of the criminal gang running the hotel but again, the movie was poorly written so I’m not quite sure.

I don’t always want my movies to be longer. This time, I did. I’ll have to watch At Bertram’s Hotel a second time to catch what I missed the first time. Subtitles would have helped, no doubt, but so would have a better, more comprehensive script and better enunciation.

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