Teresa Reviews “In a Glass Darkly” (1982)
Teresa Reviews “In a Glass Darkly” (1982), an episode from The Agatha Christie Hour.
Fidelity to text: 4 stranglers
The story got fleshed out, most significantly with what Agatha was very familiar with but didn’t address per se: shellshock or as we call it, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Quality of movie on its own: 5 stranglers
Adding shellshock was a genius touch as a way of explaining Matthew’s troubles. It fits the story, the mood, and the times.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
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The story’s title comes from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 12. Here’s the King James Version in context so you can understand why Agatha used this verse.
9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
13 And abideth [what remains constant is] faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
To translate into more modern terms, we think we know but we don’t and we should not deceive ourselves into believing otherwise. We can’t know the future and must trust in God that all will eventually made clear. The biblical meaning of charity is that it is the highest form of love, signifying the reciprocal love between God and man. It’s made manifest in unselfish love towards one’s fellow humans.
When Matthew Armitage sees a vision in a mirror of a lovely young woman being strangled by a scarred man, he’s badly shaken. When he’s introduced to Sylvia Carslake, his best friend Neil’s younger sister and the blonde in the mirror, he’s worried. When he meets Sylvia’s fiancé, Charles Crawley, and sees the scar on Crawley’s neck, he’s convinced he knows the truth.
Charles Crawley will murder Sylvia.
Matthew tells Sylvia of his vision but he doesn’t tell her that he fell in love with her at first sight (a classic Romance novel trope that sometimes happens in real life). He nobly heads off to war, sacrificing his happiness because it’s Sylvia’s choice and he doesn’t want to chase her. It wouldn’t be fair to claim Charles Crawley is a strangler and then court Sylvia himself. His motives could be misconstrued.
The Horrors of War
During the horrors of trench warfare (the producers did a decent job conveying the awfulness of the Great War on a limited budget) Matthew meets Neil again. He hasn’t seen him since Sylvia’s fateful betrothal party. Neil tells Matthew that Sylvia broke the engagement to Charles Crawley a week after the party. Neil dies in the war, as so many young men did. Matthew has to break the news to Sylvia, the first time he’s seen her since the betrothal party.
Later, Matthew is wounded. While he’s recuperating in the hospital, Sylvia visits him. He’s badly scarred but she’s not repulsed.
She tells him that Charles Crawley died fighting in the Somme. Then she confesses that she didn’t marry Crawley because she fell in love with him at the betrothal party.
They marry, but there’s trouble in paradise. Matthew’s no longer worried that Charles Crawley will strangle Sylvia but he can’t leave the war behind. The film does a good job of showing his torment. He hears the guns going off in his head, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but it never goes away completely. He gets flashbacks. It’s shellshock, another horror that the Great War gave to the world.
You have to understand what battles were like prior to mechanization. They rarely lasted more than one day. There was a lot of down time, marching from one place to another. When the sun went down, it was pitch dark and the fighting stopped.
The trenches of World War I were different. The soldiers — on both sides — never got a break. They endured listening to and coping with continuous bombardment, day and night. They fought on short notice or no notice, day or night.
Plenty of returning soldiers suffered terribly, as did their families. Agatha experienced it firsthand. She served in the wards during the war before she moved to the dispensary. She recalled in her autobiography throwing amputated limbs into the incinerator after they’d been hacked off some young man. Keep that in mind when you dismiss her as a cozy mystery writer with a cozy, comfy life. Her husband, Archie, suffered too. He had flown planes without wearing a parachute, planes that would break up in the air. He experienced long black moods where he didn’t want anyone to help him or even be around him.
By the time she got around to writing In a Glass, Darkly in 1934, much of the trauma of the Great War had receded but it never vanished. She doesn’t spell out shellshock as a contributing reason for Matthew Armitage’s jealous rages and inability to cope with normal life but she may not have felt she had to. Her audience knew all too well from coping with their own wounded fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, husbands.
The Passing of the Edwardian Age
The film almost ends up as a Twilight Zone episode. To his shock and horror, Matthew discovers who the strangler he saw in the mirror truly is. But he stops the crime.
Go back and reread the excerpt from First Corinthians, chapter 13. Matthew Armitage thought he knew the future, but he did not. He thought he understood reality, but he did not. He changed the future, unknowingly, by telling Sylvia his vision without ever understanding who the man in the mirror was. Then, he learned what was true and how he had deceived himself in so many ways.
In a Glass, Darkly is a subtle story. It was made into a better, subtle, multi-layered film showing the passage of time and the loss of one era and the start of a another. It’s well worth your time. Watch it twice and marvel at how it improves as you see more through your glass darkly.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
