Teresa Reviews “Death in the Clouds (1992)
Teresa reviews Death in the Clouds (1992), a Poirot episode.
Fidelity to text: 3 1/2 blow-gun darts
Almost everything important remains except time wasted on tennis that would have been better served filming the baying reporters at the inquest. Agatha was both funny and perceptive about the press.
Quality of movie on its own: 3 blow-gun darts
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movies on her podcast.
The clothes! The scenery of 1935 Paris! The airplane (an anachronistic Douglas C-47B Dakota from 1944 since the plane Agatha described no longer exists)! Japp in Paris!
I would have awarded 3 1/2 blow-gun darts except tennis bores me. It’s period tennis in period tennis-whites played on clay courts but the time spent enduring lobs and scoreboard changes was time that could been spent filling in plot holes and tying up loose ends. I don’t care about the real rivalry in 1935 between British player Fred Perry and German player Gottfried von Cramm or what it said about European rivalries and fear of the upcoming war.
I wanted more action in the casino, in the boulevards and cafés of Paris, a better explanation of where the poison came from, and more of what happened to Lady Cecily Horbury, her husband, and Venetia Kerr. More of Jean Dupont, archeologist, and Daniel Clancy, mystery writer, would have been nice too.
Instead, we got tennis. Worse, we got tennis hooligans but no Hastings to ooh and aah over Fred Perry’s smashes and lobs as he creamed von Cramm in the men’s singles. No Miss Lemon either, but neither of them appeared in the novel. Other characters who were in the novel got disappeared, but in service of streamlining the story for film.
Death in the Clouds is a classic locked airplane cabin mystery. Locked rooms always involve substantial amounts of misdirection, particularly when the victim and suspects are 30,000 feet in the air. That is, what did you actually see versus what you thought you saw? Agatha uses a classic trope here: no one sees the staff.
She also used another favorite trope: the couple who don’t appear to be a couple ala Death on the Nile or Evil Under the Sun. But as she frequently does, she upends it. The wife of the couple is not supposed to be on the plane, but she’s a lady’s maid so she doesn’t get any say in her transportation arrangements. Her boss commands, and she obeys. Although in this case, logic should have prevailed and the lady’s maid not risked getting on the plane and disappeared, something she was planning on doing anyway.
Quite often today, scriptwriters don’t grasp how servants lived and worked in ye olden days. The excuse is that the film had to compress 200 pages of exposition into 103 minutes of action, but that doesn’t give the writer a pass to make unrealistic choices! There was no way Lady Horbury would let her maid attend a fancy party in a fancy casino in a fancy dress and chat up the fancy guests. Madeline was a lady’s maid. She would have been back at the manor ironing Lady Horbury’s gowns, hand-mending split seams, or washing out dainties in the sink. If she was at the party, Madeline the maid would have been serving drinks in her black parlor-maid’s uniform. She would not have been a guest.
Agatha didn’t make that mistake. Agatha also didn’t make the mistake of having Lady Horbury not notice when her maid disappeared. In the novel, when Poirot telephones Lady Horbury, she is happy to talk about the base ingratitude of a servant vanishing without a word. In the film? Nothing.
Beside the tennis, the subplot with Lady Horbury, her husband, and Venetia Kerr bothered me the most in this otherwise good adaptation. The script spent plenty of time setting up their love triangle, one that appeared to not be consummated by any of the parties involved. Lady Horbury, former actress, was living a largely separate life from Lord Horbury. He admitted to Poirot to falling madly in love with her — hook, line, and sinker — and marrying in haste to repent at leisure. Yet, when faced with the possibility of the Crown making him a widower, he defended Cecily to Poirot. She, while many things, was not a murderess.
Lord Horbury and Venetia Kerr (a classic horsey member of the peerage) were friendly and companionable but their relationship didn’t look like it went past hopeful diary entries and longing but veiled glances. In the novel, Agatha went into some detail about how their path to happiness was interrupted by the shooting star that was Cecily. The novel implies that Cecily, following Poirot’s suggestion, divorces Lord Horbury. She might or might not run off with an actor she’d been keeping company with (the louche Raymond Barraclough). Lord Horbury and Venetia then do what they should have done all along.
I expected this! We got a huge buildup to Lord Horbury and Venetia’s happy ever after or Lord Horbury reconciling with Lady Horbury which could have worked and instead … nothing. How disappointing.
Time wasted watching tennis also meant that explanations of the murder plot mechanics were glossed over. I’ll admit that Agatha thought of wasps on a plane because of meeting Doctor Who and a giant space-alien wasp, causing her eleven-day disappearance (see The Unicorn and the Wasp entry). But professional that she was, she had to come up with a more plausible rationale. In the novel, our villain spent time in South Africa running a snake farm. What was on the poison dart? Snake venom. In the film, there’s no explanation for how Norman Gale, everyman dentist, got the venom. There’s also no explanation given for why he left the dart to be found or why no one heard anything (the engine noise covered it up).
The film also glossed over what kind of man he was. In the novel, Poirot discovers that there was another young lady, similar to Jane Gray, who committed suicide after an affair with Gale. Or did she? Suspicious minds know the answer. Poirot tells us, in film and novel, that Norman Gale fell madly in love — hook, line, and sinker — with Jane Gray. But like the Horbury marriage, their relationship wouldn’t have ended differently from his previous ones. He’d be rich and alive and she’d be … not.
I would have liked more time with Daniel Clancy, mystery novelist.
But it’s still a good episode and well-worth your time. You’ll get a fabulous travelogue of Paris, seeing far more than the required views of the Eiffel Tower. The first victim gets a backstory. And, best of all, you’ll get to see Chief Inspector Japp in Paris cope with the Sûreté! Anglo-French relations will never be the same.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
