Teresa Reviews Le Couteau sur la Nuque (2012), the French “Lord Edgware Dies”

Teresa reviews Le Couteau sur la Nuque (2012), the French version of “Lord Edgware Dies,” and while she enjoyed it, was disappointed they didn’t follow through on the previous episode’s story promises.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 2 nooses

You’ll recognize the basic plot but there are changes galore, including an entirely new, separate serial killer.

Quality of movie: 3 nooses

Too many loose ends that didn’t get tied up, especially for the final episode in series one of Little Murders when the previous episode set us up for something different.

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

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

There’s been an undercurrent since the first episode of season one in Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie. Who is Jean Larosière? What makes him the horndog egotist determined to outshine everyone, including himself? A self-educated polymath who prides himself on being skilled in all sorts of unlikely areas? A man who avoids close human contact?

We were fed tantalizing details along the way. In episode 5 (Le Chat et les Souris in 2010), Larosière learns to his shock he has a daughter from a long-ago liaison. In other episodes, he tells Lampion that he’s the only son he will ever have. Larosière was raised by an abusive father, coloring his entire life. When he learned the man he thought was his father wasn’t, that changed things more. Who was he? Who was his father? All he knew was some rich man got his servant mother pregnant and then threw her out into the streets.

So, in the previous episode, Un Meurtre en Sommeil (2012), the slutty lady shrink served two plot purposes. She gave Larosière and Lampion a clue as to the murderer, and she opened his mind to finally learning the identity of his father. It was right there, at the ending.

Thus, I was primed for revelations in the last episode in the series, Lord Edgware Dies. Lord Edgware is as close as Agatha got to a sadistic, amoral, hedonist who did exactly as he pleased. He was quite capable of raping a housemaid and throwing her into the streets, knowing she was pregnant with his child. All the hints are in the text. I expected Larosière to learn during the murder investigation that Lord Edgware was his rich, abandoning, careless, viciously immoral father.

It was a great set up for a great send-off to the series. But no. That’s not what we got.

Instead, daughter Juliette shows up, wanting to get to know daddy better. She’s seventeen, pretty, headstrong, and shows every sign of being stupid when her hormones or the plot demand it. This, despite showing off her knowledge of forensics at the autopsy of the strangulation victim after she was reunited with her missing foot.

Um, what? Don’t remember that detail from Lord Edgware Dies? That’s because there wasn’t a serial killer strangling young women in the original story, but there is now. There’s no mystery who it is, either. It’s Raoul Cochin, theater stagehand and backstage manager who does all the work while the theatrical impresario, Antione Marin, swans about getting all the glory.

Antione has his headaches relating to his stars, Sarah Morlant, and her drunken, estranged hubby, Pierre Fougères. They fill in for Jane Wilkinson and Lord Edgware. Could Larosière be related to Pierre? Not a chance.

The entire story set up at the conclusion of the previous episode is ignored. Instead, you get Juliette being a chip off the old block and daddy not liking it. Juliette also, despite showing signs of intelligence, shuts off her brain when confronted by the teen idol at the theater and the chance of becoming an actress. She knows a serial killer is lurking at the theater: they’ve discovered a second, strangled woman’s body. Does that make her even the slightest bit cautious or thoughtful or want to wait to consummate her relationship of one day with the teen idol whom daddy suspects of murder? Nope. If she showed signs of daddy’s brains, she would have waited.

On second thought, maybe this is like Lord Edgware Dies after all. Edgware’s daughter, Geraldine, is exactly that stupid, falling for her unsuitable, drunken cousin because he paid attention to her and it pissed off daddy. On the other hand, Juliette’s daddy routinely shuts off his brain when his appetites are at stake, so neither girl’s apple fell far from the paternal tree.

The serial killer subplot left plot threads dangling everywhere. What happened to Raoul Cochin’s scrapbook, showing his obsession with Larosière? We see him working on it. Lampion even picks it up, but doesn’t open it! Yet nothing. If he’s been murdering young women in Lille, even homeless prostitutes, wouldn’t someone have noticed? Nothing. He taunts Larosière, writing the number of Don Juan’s conquests on the first victim’s foot, chopping it off, then mailing it to him.

Except by the time a serial killer reaches the taunting the police stage, there’s usually a few bodies along with countless dead and mutilated animals. It felt like the sole reason for the added serial killer was to imperil Juliette since you can’t have a headstrong 17-year-old damsel without putting her life at stake.

The Carlotta Adams parallel had problems too. This time, she’s Lucie Frémont, the dresser, dogsbody, and lady’s maid to Sarah Morlant. She was a talented actress but as an unglamorous brunette and Hollywood ugly, she’s sneered at by everyone, including Sarah. Why does she work for that woman? Why does she willingly impersonate her at events Sarah doesn’t want to attend? It made zero sense when she got nothing from the relationship except abuse and a pitiful salary.

She resents Sarah so much she feigns breaking the neck of Sarah’s fluffy lapdog.

Lucie’s a miserable woman if she’s threatening a helpless, supremely well-behaved dog, but why does she stay? To chase after Sarah’s unwanted husband, Pierre, who rejects her love as being unworthy of his drunken self when he could be rejected by his estranged wife? Or is it that Sarah is blackmailing her over some dread deed that would send Lucie to the guillotine? There’s not a single hint of a reason.

If the script wanted to change the story up, why not make Lucie the real murderer of Pierre? She’d get rid of the man who scorned her and cast the blame on the hated Sarah. But since Sarah is Jane Wilkinson in all her ruthless egotism and selfishness, Lucie does what Sarah wants and gets her head bashed in afterwards.

It sounds like everything went wrong with the episode, but there’s plenty to like. Sarah and her husband are performing in the play Don Juan, and when he gets murdered, Larosière demonstrates that he knows the part of the legendary lover so well he’s asked to take on the role. The theater scenes gave the actors and actresses plenty of opportunity to ham it up. Sarah showed repeatedly why she was amoral enough to ensnare the dumb Comte de Tercoignes, ten years her junior, and fool him into believing she cared. She tried to seduce Larosière too.

But he’s not fooled. Sadly, the investigation leading to the solution occurs largely offstage so you get a sentence or two at the climax showing how Larosière knew to test Sarah with an Egyptian knickknack he picked up at the museum gift shop.

They both got to exit the stage with a bang. After the performance on opening night, he proved she was the murderer in front of an agog audience. She got to give two performances of her life, one in the play and again as a woman bravely heading to the guillotine.

This should have been a better ending to the series. I guess it’s to set you up for the continuing disappointment that series two of Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie will be.