Teresa Reviews “Hercule Poirot’s Christmas” (1995)

Teresa reviews “Hercule Poirot’s Christmas” (1995) and found murder most foul a cheerful way to celebrate the holidays.

Fidelity to text: 3 1/2 daggers

The usual deletions and insertions, but there’s also two major unforced errors and no, I’m not including the prologue.

Quality of movie on its own: 4 daggers

Darned good right up until the moment Poirot pulled the solution out of his boutonnière lapel vase and that the murderer wouldn’t have been that stupid.

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

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

In order to finish the Agatha Christie movie marathon within a reasonable time, we stick to a Wednesday and Friday schedule. The Poirot TV series is usually reserved for Wednesdays, and on Friday we watch a non-Poirot movie.

But this year, Friday is Christmas Eve, so what better film than Hercule Poirot’s Christmas? It’s Christmas-themed, it’s got a large, dysfunctional family gathered for the holidays, it’s got gorgeous settings and classic Christmas carols, and it’s got a considerably smaller body count than another traditional Christmas movie: Die Hard. They even share this similarity: In both movies, the big villain deserved his gruesome end.

Ambrose Bierce famously divided murder into four categories: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy (he added that which four makes no great difference to the person slain). In this case, the wealthy family patriarch Simeon Lee’s death is excusable. It would have been the fourth kind, except the murderer tried to frame innocent people — who also wanted the vicious old sod dead — and that’s not praiseworthy.

The film opens with a young Simeon Lee prospecting in the wilds of South Africa. Agatha was very fond of Africa as a result of her round-the-world cruise in 1922, and references to the country pop up often in her stories. The prologue allowed the film to demonstrate Simeon Lee’s complete lack of character and humanity. He murders his partner, beds and abandons the woman who rescues him, and becomes a wealthy man. While the prologue was necessary and useful, the scenario it set up fell apart at the dénouement as we’ll see.

We then see Poirot getting ready for a cozy, quiet Christmas at his cozy London flat. He’s looking forward to the Christmas he didn’t enjoy the previous year when he had to rescue a feckless Egyptian princeling from his folly in The Theft of the Royal Ruby. He’s all set with his Belgian chocolates, music on the radio, his book, and a fine gourmet dinner. Inspector Japp, on the other hand, is not looking forward to his Christmas holiday. He’ll be spending it freezing in Wales with his wife’s family, and singing Christmas carols around the piano until they’re hoarse.

Neither of them get the Christmas celebration they expected. In Poirot’s case, he’s settling down to dinner in White Haven Manor. Then, alas, the building’s boiler fails. No heat for the tenants. He gets a phone call from Lee wanting him to come to the his house immediately. Does Gorston Hall have central heating? Yes, it does, so off he goes.

There, Poirot meets the dysfunctional Lee family and its disagreeable patriarch, Simeon. Simeon wanted him there for… reasons which weren’t entirely clear to me. This was a change the scriptwriter made, and it’s a bad one. In the novel, Poirot is summoned for the usual reason. Simeon Lee’s body was found and he happens to be nearby spending the holiday at the home of a local police inspector (not Japp!). So why not enjoy a busman’s holiday? The film could have kept this scenario and it would have made far more sense than what we saw.

I cannot believe that the murderer — a canny, experienced man — would have persuaded Simeon Lee to invite one of the greatest detectives in the world to the scene of the planned crime. No, no, no.

The murder of Simeon Lee is one of Agatha’s great tour-de-forces. He’s a completely despicable man who, even as an old man in a wheelchair, enjoys torturing his relatives. The more you find out about him, the more you dislike him. He had it coming. So far, so usual. It’s a locked room, which she didn’t do much of. Where she excelled, stretching the boundaries of what was normal (recall that the novel was published in 1938!) was in the setup and the murderer.

Simeon Lee makes no bones about his army of illegitimate sons. He’s got so many he brags to Pilar he field a cohort as his bodyguards. This wasn’t typical of cozy mysteries written 83 years ago. Unlike today, fiction used to gloss over this kind of immoral behavior. It was implied, but it wasn’t spelled out.

Then Agatha went a step further and did what she had only done once before: She made a policeman the murderer. Murderous cops are commonplace today but in 1938? There aren’t many examples. Even more unusual, the murderous policeman is the investigating officer and a trusted authority figure.

She also used a rare motive. It’s not money. It’s not passion. It’s not status or fear. It’s not one spouse killing the other to avoid a ruinous divorce or being exposed for bigamy.

It’s rage and revenge for old sins.

Think about it. The murderer gains nothing by his crime other than satisfaction. No money, no status, no freedom from fear, no gorgeous wife while keeping the approval of the community.

The film presents this situation beautifully except when it doesn’t. I mentioned the first unforced error above. What was the second? Remember the prologue, when young Simeon Lee betrayed the woman who rescued him and left her pregnant and alone? She raises the child to hate the father who abandoned them, and even appears in the village to watch it carried out.

How Poirot connected the old lady with the port wine stain staying at the inn with Inspector Sugden we never learn. There was no reason whatsoever for Poirot to connect them. There was no way he could have known the old lady was visiting from South Africa. We didn’t see a single scene showing him or the police investigating Sugden’s background unlike Horbury’s, Magdalene Lee’s, or Pilar’s. No South African souvenirs, war records, gossip from neighbors, no furtive lunches in the pub between mother and son.

So how did Poirot know? The plot implied he just did, that’s how.

I can’t stand that kind of sloppy writing, especially when the source material didn’t make this mistake. Film is a different medium than print, so we’ve got to be shown where the answer comes from, even if only for 30 seconds.

But otherwise, this was a great episode and worth watching more than once. There are so many great moments between Poirot and Japp, Poirot and Simeon Lee, and most of all there’s Simeon Lee himself. For him, getting murdered was a quick death and for everyone else an agonizing event. You won’t be able to tear your eyes away from him and he likes it like that.

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