Teresa Reviews “Endless Night” (2013)

Teresa reviews “Endless Night” (2013) and finds that stuffing Miss Marple where she doesn’t belong creates a new nightmare.

Fidelity to text: 3 poison bottles.
Despite the completely unnecessary addition of Miss Marple, the story hews very closely to the text. The other major change is the Architect. He gets an unneeded name change (to Robbie Hayman) and the boy drowned under the ice becomes his baby brother. Robbie the Architect also gets a far more dramatic and implausible ending than he did in the novel.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 poison bottles but only because that’s the middle of the scale.
I really liked most of the movie. When did it fail? When Miss Marple came on the scene. Then it really failed; like the pieces of two wildly different jigsaw puzzles mixed together so even when the pieces fit, the finished picture is all wrong.

Endless Night is one of Agatha’s later novels. Unlike most, it’s a first-person narrative, a technique she didn’t often use. Our hero is Mike Rogers, a working-class lad. He’s wildly different from most of Agatha’s characters who, if they aren’t servants, are middle-class at the least. It’s a stunning novel, almost an elegy for lost love and lost chances, and then she burns the house down around you in the last two chapters and you have to rethink everything you’ve read up till that point.

One of the oddities about Endless Night is that it isn’t a mystery until the climax. There’s no detective onstage. It’s clear from other people’s actions (like Ellie’s lawyer, Mr. Lippincott, or the local constable) that there’s detecting going on, but Mike Rogers remains blissfully unaware of it taking place.

Stuffing Miss Marple into the story felt clumsy and strained at best; ridiculous at worst. One of the issues is why she shows up in Kingston Bishop in the first place. Keep in mind that Endless Night takes place over the course of a year at minimum and that’s taking into account the very unreliable narrator.

The story opens with Mike drifting aimlessly, working a series of dead-end jobs. He ends up in Kingston Bishop looking at the sale notice about Gypsy’s Acre. Who should he meet but Miss Marple? She’s visiting a recently widowed friend, Marjory Phillpot. Thus Major Phillpot, an important character in the novel, gets killed off and all his dramatic scenes are assigned to Miss Marple. Mike looks very handsome in his chauffer’s uniform so it’s not surprising that Miss Marple chats him up at the land auction.

Miss Marple keeps visiting Marjory Phillpot, even traveling with her overseas, just so she can keep running into Mike and pontificating about Gypsy’s Acre, its curse, and the activities of the resident crazy old gypsy lady, Mrs. Lee.

The plot demands that Miss Marple keep turning up like a bad penny. She shows up when Mike meets Ellie. She runs into him in other villages. She meets him several more times in Kingston Bishop, with or without Marjory in tow since Marjory lives there and why else would Miss Marple be there? She shows up during the courtship (quick) and the building of the modernistic horror of the house.

That house must have taken a year all by itself to build after Ellie bought the property. First, The Towers, the original massive heap of crumbling historical stone, had to be demolished. Then the lot had to be cleared, the blueprints drawn up, bids taken, permits secured, lumber and concrete purchased, and then the house built. It’s a modern pile of concrete slabs with acres of glass windows and flat roofs.

I guarantee the roof leaked within the first six months.

It’s got curtain walls of glass, ensuring that at night, the outside is a dark force pressing inward and during the day, only the isolation of the place gives any privacy. Being 1955 or so, the glass is single-pane, ensuring the building roasts in the day from the greenhouse effect and freezes at night from the lack of insulation. Winters with even worse temperature swings would be dreadful.

Add the decorating, driveways, garages for cars, utility hookups and so forth, and we’re talking a long time. Yet there’s Miss Marple on the spot as though she’s moved from St. Mary Mead to Kingston Bishop just so she can keep an eye on Mike and Ellie.

When she’s back home, presumably investigating other crimes, the movie works. When she intrudes for another extended visit with Marjory, it’s like someone else directed the movie and the entire tone of wistful creepiness vanishes. That’s an odd combination, I know, but it’s hard to describe Endless Night without sounding wistful or creepy.

What is Miss Marple doing wandering aimlessly around Kingston Bishop without Marjory? Spying on Mike and Ellie is the only possible answer.

Eventually, Greta arrives. Miss Marple notices as does everyone else. Hot blondes in low-cut dresses have this effect.

Soon afterwards, Mrs. Lee mysteriously vanishes and who investigates Mrs. Lee’s unlocked cottage? Miss Marple, naturally, despite not being a resident of the village. She discovers the wad of cash big enough to choke a horse. Not the police and not Mrs. Lee’s distant relatives, who apparently pay no attention.

When Ellie dies from a tragic accident, Miss Marple suspects murder because when pretty young women die around her, it’s always murder. This leads to the dramatic confrontation inside the folly between the murderer and Miss Marple. She reveals everything she knows: how, what, why, and when including the hidden relationship between murderer and companion. The murderer attempts to strangle Miss Marple. He’s young and strong and she’s an old lady. It’s not a fair fight. I was actually cheering him on because this wasn’t her movie! It was his! She was interfering!

Come to think of it, this episode of Marple was the last one ITV filmed. It would have made a macabre but appropriate ending to the series if Miss Marple got herself murdered for sticking her nose into someone else’s storyline.

But no. She escapes but not because she turns into Wonder Woman and develops the strength of ten because her heart is pure. It was a relief when the deus ex machine of Robbie the consumptive Architect arrives onstage. He discovers to his shock and horror that his boyhood chum had not struggled to save his drowning little brother as everyone thought.

No, dear friend had murdered little brother over a wristwatch. In revenge, Robbie the Architect torches his modernistic heap of glass curtain walls and poured concrete. This distracts the murderer from killing Miss Marple.

I was distracted too, trying to figure out what was burning in that pile because concrete and glass are not flammable in the same fashion as timber. The building had flames shooting out of it, yet there wasn’t enough furnishings and wooden floors to burn with that kind of enthusiasm. Maybe Robbie the Architect lit the gas on fire. Only a gas explosion would make concrete burn and maybe not then. Arson of this kind, in this sort of structure, requires accelerants.

If you can separate Miss Marple from the rest of the movie, Endless Night works quite well. There’s moody settings, modernist architecture, beautiful costumes, and scenery-chewing actors. The mood overall is a nightmare-tinged dream. Mike is compelling and you can see why Ellie fell for him and equally why his own mother knows he can’t be trusted.

But unless you’re a Miss Marple fan, this Endless Night can feel true to its title. Stick with the other adaptations where the scriptwriter didn’t “improve” the novel by shoving her into a place she was never meant to be.

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