Teresa Reviews Man in the Brown Suit (2016)
Teresa reviews Man in the Brown Suit (2016) a.k.a. L’Homme au complet marron and found it decent but only one scene came from the novel
(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.
Fidelity to text: ½ gun
A man wears a brown suit. Another man is a double agent. A third man wears a dress. That’s it!
Quality of film: 3 guns
Pretty decent considering how much plot was crammed into not nearly enough time, making it confusing to keep track of the characters.
Erase your every memory of Agatha’s novel of romantic suspense. It won’t help you make sense of the overly busy plot. One man wears a brown suit. There’s a master spy. Another man wears a dress.
After that, the completely rewritten plot springs from the novel’s opening scene where a dancer discusses how to quit being a spy for the mysterious colonel. That is, the opening throwaway paragraphs become the plot for this film. No Anne Beddingfeld racing across London, cruising to South Africa, getting kidnapped, menaced by thugs, betrayed by a man she trusted, nearly drowned in Victoria Falls, and then finding true love. Gone, permanently lost in darkest Africa. Read our annotated version of the novel if you want to experience them, because Anne’s nowhere to be seen here.
Not surprisingly, Agatha’s opening paragraphs needed substantial beefing up to fill the episode’s 90-minute running time. Luckily, Agatha wrote several spy novels along with her mysteries. An enterprising screenwriter could rifle through them looking for secret identities, high-level betrayal, lovely spies dying in their would-be lover’s arms after whispering a fateful clue, run-over witnesses, add the recent and still-traumatic past, and press frappé.
This is how you transmogrify a story you know into something completely different. And, of course, making sure to give our three leads plenty of star turns.
Just don’t confuse anyone here with the novel’s characters. Even Sir Eustace gets only the barest parallel; omitting his fabulous cover persona of Bertie Wooster all growed up and in a position of authority to his and everyone else’s surprise.
Thus, our story opens at the opera house late at night. Nadine makes a secretive phone call to an unknown number. She tells the caller she’s identified someone code-named the Colonel. The line goes dead and she flees. She demonstrates she learned nothing in spy school and stands in the middle of the street, watching an oncoming car speed toward her, ignoring the possibility of cover and concealment amid the parked cars on either side.
But, demonstrating her opponent also didn’t go to spy school, he doesn’t shoot her several more times to eliminate a witness. Double tap, you know, and it’s obviously well past midnight based on the completely empty street so why not take the risk? The opera house caretaker witnesses the shooting but from hiding, demonstrating he has watched at least one spy movie. Not that it does him any good later.
Despite being severely wounded, Nadine somehow staggers from the Lille Opera house to Laurence’s fifth floor bachelor pad. She must have left a trail of blood along the way and yet didn’t attract attention from the late-night citizens of Lille or the shooter. Laurence opens the door, doesn’t race for his first aid kit, so she dies in his arms after whispering “Gilbert.”
Who? Why Gilbert Loyson, the man in charge of an important branch of the French secret service. He, Nadine, and Laurence were part of La Résistance during the war, fighting Nazis and French collaborators. Laurence’s past surfaced briefly in a previous episode (Le Crime ne pai pas / Murder on the Links) and you might have hoped that this episode means we’ll learn more.
But you won’t.
Les Petits shows no sense of continuity and here, where it matters because of the La Résistance connections, they prove it again. Laurence’s secret agent friend in that episode was named Gilbert Bourdet, but he’s a different Gilbert from this Gilbert. Here’s a hint for you apprentice writers: Don’t reuse names if you can possibly help it; not without a darned good explanation.
Laurence contacts the correct Gilbert and discovers Nadine was trying to identify the Colonel, a Russian double agent. And where do you typically find Russians in the 1950s? Where you have ballet dancers. We soon meet the temperamental Russian star, Tatiana Pochenko; the high-strung theater manager, Alexandre Latour; his long-suffering assistant, Eustache Miller; the much put-upon choreographer, Patrick Mallet; rival ballerinas; the nosy caretaker and his wife; and a mysterious man in a brown suit (more like an overcoat) who turns out to be Tatiana’s brother, Sergueï.
Laurence must go undercover at the Opera House to replace Nadine and unearth the mole. So he fakes a catastrophic heart attack, puts on a dress, and becomes Brigitte, the new secretary.
This leads to many comic scenes of him learning to walk in heels, wear makeup, put up with Tricard getting handsy, and listening to his secretary Marlène explain that yes, if you want to be glamorous, you must suffer. It takes work to be beautiful.
Meanwhile, Avril receives a mysterious phone call offering to sell her a dramatic, newsworthy tip. She meets her new informant in front of La Voix du Nord’s office and, showing her tipster didn’t pay enough attention at the movies, he gets run down in front of her. She doesn’t get the license number. Since Laurence is supposedly dying in the hospital, Avril tries to report her suspicions to Tricard and is brushed off since no reporter, even one with a track record like hers, should be listened to.
Remember Les Petits lack of continuity? Avril once again turns into a middle-school Nancy Drew wannabe who’s so eager to score points on Laurence that she doesn’t listen when he claims he’s trying to prevent World War III. If the colonel gets his way, microfilm of important nuclear secrets will end up in Moscow, leading to bigger troubles for Avril than not getting a scoop. Does she care? Had she learned anything about working with the police? About trying to serve the greater good? As if.
She eventually learns that Laurence is alive and disguised as Brigitte the secretary. This leads to more badly underwritten scenes where I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I sort of understood her being kidnapped by Gilbert’s agents but the way it was scripted made sure you, dear viewer, knew Avril was never at any risk. If those had been real thugs, she’d have been roughed up, possibly raped, and terrified. Instead, she got to play Action Girl, defying a pack of strong, armed men without peril to herself.
The scene when Laurence was ambushed by Sergueï was strange. Why didn’t Sergueï kill him when he had the chance? Apparently, they both knew the other was looking for the colonel? So, they were able to work together? A former La Résistance fighter trying to save France from WWIII accepts what a Russian killer tells him? I couldn’t see a reason for it. I’m still not sure how Tatiana’s ballet slipper ended up in the caretaker’s wife’s flat. Because Sergueï hid it there?
And Laurence’s explanation for how he suddenly knew Gilbert was the colonel was almost as foolish as their final confrontation when you knew that nobody in that opera house went to either spy school or the police academy.
But it’s watchable, with plenty of ballet, always a plus. It’s almost as fun as the 1989 TV movie version. Almost.
