Teresa reviews Go Back for Murder (1980)

Teresa reviews Go Back for Murder (1980), the Italian version of the play based on Five Little Pigs.

(Delitto retrospettivo)

(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 3 poisoned beers

Carla’s jerk boyfriend gets disappeared, destroying the love triangle.

Quality of movie: 3 poisoned beers

The stage play was filmed, so expect stagy, static, and limited action. The auto-generated subtitles were awful.

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

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

This review represents the outcome of an experiment. During our quest to find international movies with English subtitles, we discovered several Agatha films on YouTube with subtitles generated using AI. Is it possible that this brave new world of artificial intelligence could bridge the language barrier and open world cinema to English speakers?

We decided to find out by watching Delitto retrospettivo, an Italian TV version of Go Back for Murder, broadcast in 1980.

Before we reveal the results, let’s delve into the play’s background.

Agatha occasionally rewrote her short stories into something better or longer. When she rewrote a Poirot novel for the stage, she always removed him rather than endure yet another awful impersonation of the character she so clearly saw in her mind’s eye. As the creator, it’s her prerogative to make improvements or changes, especially when squeezing a complex novel into a play.

In 1960, Agatha transformed Five Little Pigs (1941) into Go Back for Murder. She removed Poirot, assigned his role to a new character, condensed the action to a stage, had the memories acted by the same cast but youthened, performed wholesale character removal, and added a love triangle between Carla Crale, her bombastic Canadian fiancé, Jeff Rogers, and Justin Fogg, Poirot’s solicitor replacement. Agatha was a romantic.

She liked pairing off characters so they got their happy ever after. After all, she did too, when she met Max Mallowan in 1930.

This is an odd film, a statement which should not imply that you should rush to YouTube to watch it right away. I spotted three unforced errors, making it worse than it should have been.

Unlike other filmed stage plays, even Spider’s Web (1960 and 1982), this film is very obviously shot on a single set. The walls move as the set changes just like in a theater. I haven’t seen that before. If you expect stage plays to be expanded to take advantage of movable cameras, you’ll be disappointed. The staginess while tolerable, is not desirable.

The subtitles were the worst I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a wide variety of them now. They were legible and large, but they were also AI-generated. A genuine, bilingual translator fluent in Italian and English, with the text ready at hand, didn’t come anywhere near the verbiage you see onscreen. Instead, you get barely comprehensible word salad that doesn’t reflect what’s happening on the screen. You get partial words. Pronouns are always wrong, both to gender and tense. That is, “you” (present tense) will be replaced by “him” (past tense) or “it.”

AI translation is clearly not ready for prime time TV.

Have you seen those jumbo screens used at college graduations where what the speaker is saying is written on the chyron scroll, errors, ums, and all? Where words are misspelled, names are mangled, and when the speaker speaks too fast for the voice to text translator, words appear as fragments when they’re not skipped over entirely?

It’s like that. Worse, the AI subtitling is also trying to — at the same time! — translate Italian into English and failing. English has a set order to words in a sentence: subject, verb, object. Italian is similar but it’s not identical. YouTube’s AI subtitling heard a word in Italian, translated it, and put it on the screen. It paid no attention to who was speaking. One sentence ran into another, with punctuation sprinkled largely at random. The translation of pronouns is equally random, making the story harder to follow.

YouTube’s built-in subtitling shows off the versatility of speech to text generators. It shows off how well translation software works. It also proves how much those methods must improve to come close to the work of a human translator using the film, a copy of the play, and an Italian/English dictionary. That translator would watch a minute of film, decide who was speaking and what they said, check their dictionary to get the words correct, and check the play’s script to see if what the actors say matches the script, and then decide what words to put onscreen. Word by word. Minute by minute. It’s labor-intensive, which is yet another reason so many of Agatha’s international films don’t come with English subtitles.

The third issue was removing Jeff Rogers, which radically altered the slowly developing trust and eventual love between Carla Crale and Justin Fogg. In the play, Jeff Rogers is Carla’s Canadian cattle-breeding fiancé. He tolerates Carla’s desire to learn the truth about her mother’s actions and her father’s death, but he’s not what you’d call supportive. He wants it done so they can return to Canada and put that foolishness behind them.

Justin Fogg had a teenager’s crush on Carla’s mother all those years ago and now, here’s Carla in his office, looking just like her mother and needing his help. But he doesn’t help her because he can’t see how he can. Caroline Crale poisoned Amyas. No one else could have done it. He refuses to help Carla.

Then, after Carla leaves Justin’s office, Jeff Rogers intervenes. He doesn’t want her to investigate. He approves of Justin refusing the case. He tells Justin that he’s concerned about possible madness in Carla’s family. He’s a cattle breeder and understands genetics but he’ll take the risk of marrying Carla and having kids anyway. He’s rude to Justin and ruder to Justin’s longtime office clerk, Turnball.

When Jeff Rogers leaves, Justin calls Carla back into his office and tells her he’ll take the case.

Gradually, Justin and Carla fall in love as he helps her interview Philip and Meredith Blake, Angela Warren, Miss Williams, and Lady Melksham, aka model Elsa Greer. Justin supports Carla’s decisions, he aids her in her quest for the truth, and he doesn’t belittle her for wanting to know the truth.

Losing that story weakened the climax of the film, where Carla smiles at Justin, and you get the feeling that maybe there might be something there. The terrible subtitles made it harder to see any emotional connection between the two of them. Agatha states in the play that Justin Fogg recognized quality when he saw it and Carla Crale is quality. He compares Elsa Greer to Caroline Crale: Elsa Greer chases famous and exciting celebrities. She’d never see the man, only his position in the world. But Caroline Crale would recognize quality in a solicitor. Like him, perhaps. Like Carla might. And eventually, Carla does.

This is a hard film to judge accurately. It was shot on videotape for Italian TV, so it’s severely degraded and blurry. The actors were lackluster. The staginess made the film less interesting because it’s all talk. And most of all, the terrible AI-generated subtitles meant you didn’t know who was speaking, you didn’t know who they were speaking about, and you didn’t get the full text of what they said.

But this is the only film version of the play Go Back for Murder allowing you to see what happens when Agatha removes Poirot and replaces him with someone else.