Teresa Reviews “Hickory Dickory Dock” (1995)

Teresa reviews “Hickory Dickory Dock” (1995) and found it as tantalizing as pig’s trotters.

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

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

Fidelity to text: 2½ poison bottles

Ch-ch-ch-changes galore. The plot, the characters, the subplots, the motivations, the relationships, even how one of the murders is committed. Plus mice.

Quality of movie on its own: 2½ poison bottles

It looks good but it feels wrong, like eating vegan cheese when you could be enjoying a nice slab of Stinking Bishop. Also, mice everywhere!

All the previous episodes of Poirot adapted stories and novels written prior to or during WWII. Changing the setting to the 1930s didn’t matter much, or not at all.

Hickory Dickory Dock was published in 1955. Times were changing. Although Agatha wrote contemporaries, she didn’t pay too much attention to current events, unless it fit a plot point or a character. In Hickory Dickory Dock, one student refers to the American witch hunts for communists. Not an issue in 1935, so it was dropped without causing a problem.

And of course, there’s the student hostel, providing housing for a wide range of international students. All of whom vanished in the adaptation, whitewashed out of existence.

You can complain about her characterizations of Mr. Akibombo, West African student, and the other diverse students from Jamaica, India, Egypt, France and so on. But Agatha didn’t pretend they didn’t exist or deny them a right to an education.

This film does. It’s set in London, home of many universities, but Cambridge and Oxford were admitting students from India before 1900. By 1930, at least 1,800 Indian students attended universities in Britain. They needed to if they wanted to enter the Indian civil service, or professions such as the law, police, engineering and medicine. Britain was ambivalent about educating non-British citizens of the Empire, but not to the degree seen in this episode.

Since Mr. Akibombo disappeared along with the other foreign students (except Sally Finch, hot American brunette), so did many plot points, which vanished or were rewritten.

Fortunately, Miss Lemon’s sister, Mrs. Hubbard, remains. She’s still a widow from Singapore. I’d have liked to have seen more of her and less of mice running rampant in the youth hostel. I can’t believe any sister of Miss Lemon would permit free-ranging vermin.

Mrs. Nikoletis, Greek owner of the youth hostel, gets a major rewrite. She’s much more active in the smuggling business, giving away the major subplot within the first ten minutes of the show. Instead of apparently dying from a fall due to drunkenness (which kept motivations unclear), she’s stabbed. This wouldn’t normally be a problem (so much more dramatic!) except that she loses her daughter in the rewrite.

The daughter is Valerie Hobhouse. She was turned into a fashion student instead of a buyer for a beauty salon and accessory boutique. As a buyer, she traveled around the continent, easily concealing her smuggling activities. Living in the hostel overseen by her mother (no one knew the relationship) meant she could supervise the operation.

Two issues arose from the rewrite. One, fashion students hand-sewing fancy seams use thimbles! It takes time to rip and resew a seam, something she wouldn’t have time to do when removing the smuggled merchandise from rucksacks without being noticed by the owner.

The more important second issue is that Valerie knew her mother was a lush. It wasn’t a terrible surprise when her mother fell in the gutter, hit her head, and died. But when she learned that her mother had fallen as a result of being drugged with morphine in her brandy and died, Valerie was angry. She knew she was going to jail for smuggling. She no longer cared, not as long as she could ensure her mother’s murderer went to the gallows. Not here. Valerie has no reason to care about Mrs. Nikoletis so why should she care about the murderer’s fate? She doesn’t and we lose a heartbreaking scene.

Celia also lost some complexity, but not as much as Patricia Lane. Patricia is a few years older than Nigel Chapman, and she’s crazy about him in a maternal, motherly way. She’s constantly after him to reconcile with his father, straighten up his act, and makes excuses about him to anyone who’ll listen. Here, she turns into a political junkie who discovers by accident the connection between Nigel and his past.

Nigel lost most of his complexity as well. He stopped being the smartest person in the room (in his own mind). Nigel should be superior, overconfident, annoying, smug, and too clever for his own good. He became just another student. It was Nigel who stole the morphine — and two other drugs — to prove he could, not Colin.

Making Colin steal the drugs didn’t make any sense other than to tart up the plot. He’s a psychology student, not a psychology patient. I couldn’t buy him stealing drugs from the pharmacy where Celia works. He’s presumably smart enough to know that she, the junior person on staff, would get blamed when the morphine went missing.

Sally Finch stopped being an American student. She turned into a junior spy working for the excise and customs bureau as an undercover agent. She claims to be studying (on a Fulbright scholarship, which didn’t exist in 1935) English poetry. Poirot quickly figures out that she’s lying when he quotes Shelley, and she thinks it’s Keats.

I didn’t have a problem with Chief Inspector Japp replacing Inspector Sharpe. Japp’s part of the show so it made sense. I could even accept Mrs. Japp being away so he’s on his own, leaving dirty dishes in the sink and (badly) ironing his shirts.

I couldn’t accept how his relationship with Poirot was handled. Once again, Japp became stupid because the plot demanded it. He’s not a stupid man. He and Poirot have known each other for years. So why did Japp not know that Poirot overheated his flat? Why did he have problems with Poirot’s cooking? Poirot’s cooked for him plenty of times. They’ve dined together in restaurants. We get a scene in the fancy butcher where Japp’s horrified by the cost of meat and asks for scrag ends. That’s the cheapest part of a lamb or sheep’s neck. A man who’s poor enough to eat that cut isn’t going to turn his nose up at meaty pig trotters, as prepared by Poirot, gourmet chef. Japp would cheerfully eat them.

The entire Japp-as-a-hapless-bachelor scenario set us up for a tasteless closing scene involving faggots (British meatballs made from pork offal similar to scrapple) and spotted dick (steamed pudding with raisins).

There were also mice. Everywhere. The hostel is infested. Scene after scene of circus-quality trained mice racing about on specially-built mouse-sized sets. Why mice? Because the scriptwriter emphasized the nursery rhyme. In the novel, it’s minimal. The hostel is on Hickory Street and Nigel twists the rhyme to

Hickory, Dickory Dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The police said “boo”
I wonder who
Will eventually stand in the dock?

Time that could have been spent on characterization and plot was wasted on watching mice run along drain pipes and under floorboards when it wasn’t being wasted on Japp using a bidet to wash his face. Again, he’s supposed to be a longtime friend of Poirot and a frequent visitor. Idiotic.

The mouse makes a final appearance, running up the grandfather clock, while Poirot is summing up the case with the aid of Miss Lemon. Where is Miss Lemon’s Siamese cat when you need him? Snap, snap! Yum, yum!