Teresa Reviews Black Coffee (1973) from West Germany

Teresa reviews “Black Coffee” (1973), a TV movie from West Germany written by Agatha Christie.

Watch Bill and Teresa discuss Black Coffee at “Agatha Christie, They Watched.”

Fidelity to play: 4 poison bottles
The speaking parts got shortened or removed but everything important remains.

Quality of movie: 3 poison bottles
It moved along smartly but it felt truncated. The cast didn’t have a chance to reveal themselves.

This West German TV movie from 1973 is one of three existing adaptations of Agatha Christie’s first produced play, Black Coffee, written in 1930. No matter what you see elsewhere, Black Coffee is not the first play Agatha wrote. That honor goes to The Conqueror, written when she was in her teens. It has never been produced. She wrote several other plays in her teens and twenties, which remain unpublished and unproduced. Read Julius Green’s book Curtain Up! Agatha Christie: A Life in the Theatre (2015) for the details about her theatrical endeavors. The Mousetrap (1952) is the most famous but it’s the tip of her iceberg.

Thus, when Agatha, a longtime theatergoer, attended Michael Morton’s play version of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which he retitled Alibi in 1928, she was primed and ready. She’d written several plays, although they hadn’t been produced. She had eight novels, numerous short stories, and poems under her belt. She had a good idea of how a play differed from those other forms. Why have someone else write an adaptation when she could do it? She also didn’t want to watch another badly written interpretation of Poirot.

So she wrote Black Coffee. What’s remarkable about this play is that it’s an original story, i.e., not adapted from a short story or novel and it stars Poirot, along with Hastings and Inspector Japp. In the play’s initial run, Francis L. Sullivan (six foot, two) played Poirot. According to her autobiography, she enjoyed his performance but he wasn’t Poirot. After Black Coffee, Agatha never again wrote a Poirot play. When she later adapted a Poirot story for the stage, which she did several times, she wrote him out. With Poirot gone altogether, she didn’t have to watch a badly cast actor fail at embodying her words and her vision of her detective.

Her three act play gives all the characters time to reveal themselves to each other and to the audience. Unfortunately, this version isn’t the complete play. The German TV production company truncated plenty of dialog. But that’s what plays are: dialog! We lose some comic trappings where Caroline and her ball of wool drive Dr. Carelli mad or her lengthy discussion of Beeswax vitamins. We lose Barbara’s boredom in the country, her wild ways and flirtatiousness, and how she flirts with Hastings to – it seems likely — conceal her affair with Dr. Graham. We lose Richard Amory’s need for money. A little of how he adores Lucia even when he suspects of her of cheating on him remains but not enough. We lose Barbara admitting to Hastings that no, she didn’t miss Professor Amory at all and in fact, everyone’s kind of grateful the old man is gone.

Lucia Amory gets plenty of screen time, yet she still loses many of her scenes. As Richard’s much younger Italian wife with a mysterious past, she’s the obvious suspect. She came to the marriage with an Italian maid who gets a little screen time of her own with Treadwell, the butler. But I missed the scene where Poirot questions Lucia about her maid and the one where he trapped her into admitting who she was and where she’d been. The AI translation that produced the subtitles really fell down on the job with Lucia. Her mother, the international superspy gets described as a fashion photographer. The lines about her stolen diamond necklace (given to Carelli as blackmail) get so mangled as to be incomprehensible.

Edward Raynor, Professor Amory’s secretary, spends little time onscreen although he’s a critical character. When Raynor loses his dialog, it made the climax feel like it came from left field. He is a logical suspect when Poirot points it out but it still felt like he was entrapped so Lucia, the damsel in distress, didn’t have to be guilty. It’s lucky for Poirot that Raynor did it.

Another bit we lost is Poirot explaining to Hastings that Raynor’s plan was not a spur of the moment crime, inspired by the sudden presence of a suspiciously oily Italian doctor who would be, to an English family and English policemen, the obvious suspect. Inspector Japp even comments that Dr. Carelli is the perfect suspect.

We also don’t get the true climax. Carelli is unmasked as a blackmailer and Raynor is revealed as the murderer. Poirot has discovered the formula torn into strips and twisted into spills for the fireplace. He gives the torn-up formula to Richard who comments about how damaging to the family the formula for ultra-high explosives has been. He gives it to Lucia who burns the valuable formula saying, “There is so much suffering already in the world. I cannot bear to think of anymore.”

We did get other things instead. It was a treat to see Treadwell, the butler, use Professor Amory’s wonderful, windup gadget to open and close doors and then lock them tight. As a good butler, he naturally wouldn’t comment on how it would be easier and faster to operate the doors himself.

The clothes are wonderful, although not period-correct for 1930. They look Edwardian to me and so continental. Lucia wears the perfect dress for a damsel in distress, all floaty white gauze with serious underwiring so her heaving bosom is on full display. Barbara and Caroline are stylish too. Dr. Carelli got a cream suit so you knew he was a foreigner.
In another bit, Dr. Graham rides up on a bicycle and leaves a note on it. We translated it for you:

This bicycle takes me to my patients.
Do not steal it. You could be next.
Dr. Hume Graham

Horst Bollmann played Poirot with Jochen Sostmann as Captain Hastings. They played well off of each other but again, the short running time meant Hastings lost many of his scenes too. They acted well enough as a team that it’s a shame that German TV didn’t film more Agatha Christie stories. It was a reminder that Black Coffee could have been filmed by the Poirot production company with David Suchet. It’s perfect. Why hasn’t this play, like The Unexpected Guest never been filmed in English? It’s a mystery worthy of Poirot.

This movie is flawed, mainly because it’s just too darn short. Despite the changes, I recognized many of the lines as being lifted directly from the play, or at least from Charles Osborne’s novelization. Cutting all the dialog does make for a faster paced film but it also made the film feel like a Wikipedia summary and not a fully-fledged drama.