Teresa Reviews Death in the Clouds (2005)

Teresa reviews Death in the Clouds (2005) and found the multi-episode story a faithful adaptation.

(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 4 poisoned darts

Maybelle, Oliver, and Hastings replaced a few minor characters. Otherwise, it’s all there.

Quality of movie: 4 poisoned darts

Lovely, evocative watercolor tour of Paris complement a fast-paced story.

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

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

This is the last episode in the Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot and Marple series. It’s a shame it doesn’t come to a conclusive, tie-up-all-the-loose-ends finale. Miss Marple and Poirot never meet to compare notes about Maybelle becoming a great detective. Nor, despite numerous scenes of birds flying overhead and waterfowl behaving like waterfowl instead of cute animal sidekicks, does Oliver fly away to build a life of his own as an independent duck; paralleling Maybelle at the beginning of the series when she abandoned father Raymond West’s mundane plans for her.

But it has an ending. Poirot presents Maybelle with a butterfly pin for her 17th birthday (because she’s becoming her adult self like a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly?) and tells her she’s becoming a good detective. A new case arrives and off they go into the sunset to investigate.

So! Back to the beginning. Maybelle’s visiting Aunt Jane and learning to bake cookies. Poirot will return from a trip to Paris, and she and Hastings will meet him at the Croydon airfield.

On the flight, Poirot moves his seat to accommodate two wealthy ladies and settles in to nap. The passengers talk among themselves as they pass the boring trip over the channel from Paris to Croydon. Air travel should always be boring; when it’s not, it’s because something awful is happening.

And so it proves. Poirot is awakened when the steward, Mitchell, discovers passenger Madame Marisot slumped in her seat. She’s dead. A handy doctor verifies it. Poirot slept through the murder, but he wakes in time to spot what Dr. Bryant missed: the dead woman has a wasp sting on her neck.

Was there a wasp onboard the plane? Unlikely as it seems, there was. Passenger Jean Dupont admits to killing the wasp.

Poirot also spots a tiny barb attached to a fluff of black and orange. It’s a poisoned dart, of the type used by South American tribes to hunt in the jungle. Could there be a blowgun onboard? Unlikely as it seems, there is.

It’s stuffed behind Poirot’s own seat, the one he took to allow Lady Cecily Horbury to sit with her frenemy, Venetia Kerr.

That relationship was greatly truncated so here’s the synopsis: Lord Horbury foolishly married stunning chorus girl/gold-digger gambling Cecily instead of the wellborn, plainer, equestrienne girl next door, Venetia. All three parties realize he was an idiot but what should they do next? Those complexities were jettisoned over the channel.

The blowgun leads to many discussions that, if you’re paying attention, form one of Agatha’s great tropes. Everyone agrees that using a blowgun, even one a foot long instead of the normal six-foot length (a famous Agatha mistake) was impossible. Somebody would have noticed! Yet no one did. Hastings even tests the theory, using a rolled-up magazine. Everyone around him perks up and wonders why he’s creeping about the cabin blowing into a tube.

Poirot swiftly concludes, but doesn’t say aloud, no blowgun was used. The purpose of the blowgun is to muddy the waters, leading the investigation astray down fascinating side streams instead of focusing on mundane facts. What are those mundane facts? That the old lady was Madame Giselle, a noted for her discretion moneylender to the wealthy. Madame Giselle was not above blackmailing her clients if they didn’t pay up. Lady Horbury, whose seat Poirot took, uses cocaine (the film omits this), gambles incessantly, and is trysting with a handsome young actor (the film tastefully elides over this with a newspaper story close-up) instead of remaining faithful to Lord Horbury.

Are there other, equally damning mundane facts? There are. Madame Giselle was a rich woman. The sole heir to her huge estate is a mysterious young woman she abandoned to a Canadian orphanage twenty some years ago. Abandoned children grow up and often, as adults, resent being dumped in some orphanage. Where is this young woman? No one knows. Could she be involved? She doesn’t appear to have been on the plane, but if she was, she’s an even better suspect than Lady Horbury.

Poirot, Inspector Sharpe, and Inspector Fournier of the Sûreté join forces and get to know the other passengers better. It turns out that Jane Grey, sitting opposite dentist Norman Gale, knows Maybelle! She cuts Maybelle’s hair. She, an orphan, is on the plane because she won a prize in the Irish Sweepstakes and wanted to visit Nice. Norman is returning from a busman’s holiday where he looked at dental equipment in Paris.

Father and son archeologists, Armand and Jean Dupont, could have used blowpipes but deny it and anyway, that was impossible. Similarly, author Daniel Clancy (a very early prototype of Ariadne Oliver) owns a blowpipe and knows his poisons, but it wasn’t him either. Lady Horbury turns out to have been an orphan before she was a chorus girl. Venetia Kerr is the oddity. She’s not an orphan, she’s not a world traveler with a collection of interesting souvenirs, she’s not plotting a book, and she doesn’t need to secretly borrow money.

The cabin stewards, Mitchell and Davis, are horrified and baffled by the murder. Like everyone else, they didn’t see a thing. One remembers an oddity: Madame Giselle had a second spoon on her coffee saucer. Where did it come from?

Poirot, who’s always several steps ahead of everyone else, considers the mundane facts. No one saw a thing, so therefore, there wasn’t anything unusual to see. This is why he’s so adamant about getting the list of what the passengers in the rear cabin had on them and working out everyone’s movements. Somehow, someone, in full view, murdered Madame Giselle. Could that person be invisible?

Well, yes, as he swiftly realized. There’s a kind of magic in the plain white linen jacket and dark pants of a servant. No one sees a servant unless they need something. Lady’s maids, stewards, and waiters are professionally invisible. If you look like you’re doing your job, whether serving coffee or bringing your mistress her manicure case so she can fix a chipped nail, you blend instantly into the background.

He realizes that there was someone else in the rear cabin: Lady Horbury’s maid. This woman turns out to be the missing orphan and heir to Madame Giselle’s fortune. But did she do it? Shockingly, she turns up dead, but her death proves that someone else with a mundane background is involved. Someone who’s not mundane at all, when you get to know him better. Someone with a plain white linen jacket, nerves of steel, the ability to play a part, and the ability to tell you it won’t hurt a bit and make you believe him.
Poirot reveals all and, in the process, sets up Jane Grey with a better job in a faraway place with a much better man.

Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot and Marple adapted 19 stories in all. I’ve seen 13 of them. If you want to introduce Agatha to your kids, this is a good way to do it.