Teresa Reviews “Murder at the Gallop” (1963): Hi Yo, Miss Marple!
Fidelity to text: 1 cat
Yes, cats. A cat serves as the first murder weapon followed by a hatpin in this extremely loose interpretation of After the Funeral, a Hercule Poirot novel. What’s that you shrieked? Margaret Rutherford is portraying Miss Marple in a Poirot novel!? Yes, and that’s just the beginning of the changes.
Quality of movie on its own: 3 cats
It should have been better. Margaret Rutherford is always fun to watch, she’s got great costars, and the original story is complex and satisfying. Too bad the film didn’t hold together. The scriptwriter cut out everything that explained motivation while adding plenty of loose ends that never got tied up.
After the Funeral (Funerals Are Fatal in the U.S. editions) was a Hercule Poirot novel published in 1953. It is outstanding, one of Agatha’s best, and would have made a terrific film. This version isn’t it.
Even though the scriptwriter slashed apart the novel, you need to be familiar with the storyline in order to understand the film’s plot. Too much material was skipped or glided over. Motivations in particular were decidedly unclear; other than greed. That one’s easy, but that’s not the motivation for murder in the novel, and it’s not the motivation here either. Sort of, but again, the script was muddy.
Murder at the Gallop was one of the many reasons why Agatha Christie became so reluctant to sign movie or television contracts. Hollywood took a perfectly good plot involving Poirot and reworked it into an almost unrecognizable Margaret Rutherford vehicle. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer owned the rights and they galloped into the sunset with them.
I know the James M. Cain quote about how Hollywood doesn’t ruin books: the book is still up there on the shelf. That’s true, but let’s be honest. For every person who reads a novel, one hundred people watch a movie. How many of them read the novel a movie is based on? Quite a few, based on the paperbacks I see at the grocery store book rack with an image from the film as the new cover. Then comes the more important question. How many of those readers are aghast when they read the original story? It’s not like the movie at all! If they preferred the movie (which does happen because some movies are far better than their source novel) they’ll never pick up another book by the author again.
Or worse, they’ll have a completely wrong interpretation of what Author writes. If Movie Viewer never again reads a book by Author, Author loses. The Hollywood money was nice, sometimes very nice, but Author lost a potential reader along with Reader’s book-loving friends. That’s the effect Murder at the Gallop would have. You can see the original story writhing underneath, trying to break free and failing, and confusing potential readers.
So does the movie function if you blank out memories of Hercule Poirot and tea shops? Mostly, it does. It opens with a bang. Miss Marple and Mr. Stringer are soliciting door-to-door for a criminal rehabilitation charity. They come darn close to breaking into the Enderby mansion looking for donations. But they do, and witness terrified, elderly, reclusive and rich Mr. Enderby stagger to the top of the stairs and fall down them.
A cat appears and Miss Marple is instantly suspicious.
Miss Marple notifies the police. Inspector Craddock ignores her. She and Mr. Stringer listen in on the reading of the will (an amusing scene; make sure you pay attention to how the bequests were written so you can modify your will accordingly) and then they hear sister Cora, heavily veiled and estranged from the family, ask if Enderby was murdered.
Miss Marple, taking the law into her own hands like always, visits Cora to investigate and discovers her dead, with another cat in her lap.
Cora was murdered with a hatpin. If you’ve never seen one, a hatpin is sharp-tipped and as long as a knitting needle. You can do serious damage to a masher with a hatpin and ladies did just that back in ye olden days but even so, killing was harder. You’d have to go through the eye or ear into the brain, not some random place in the ribs.
Cora’s companion, the timid and mousy Miss Milchrest, is aghast. She’s also no help.
The action moves to Hector Enderby’s conveniently nearby hotel for equestrians. Miss Marple checks in and sleuths, witnessing but unable to prevent another murder. This murder is also strange: it uses a panicked horse, the victim trapped in a stall, and a small boulder pressing down the accelerator of a car. Again, very tidy and hands-free for the cautious murderer, as long as no one sees them driving the car and abandoning it in the stable yard.
Eventually, Miss Marple solves the murders but how is a darned good question. We’re never shown any kind of logical deductions from clues the audience could pick up on. Nor does she prove whydunit. There’s the mysterious painting, supposedly worth £50,000. This is separate from the £25,000 each of the heirs will receive. That’s a lot of money but I wasn’t sure why the murderer cared. I understood why the rest of the family cared, even the ones who wanted the painting only to hang on their wall.
The novel has a rational and sad motivation for the crime; not one bit made it into the film unless you count Hector Enderby wanting to keep his hotel going. Compared to that, the movie’s ending did not make sense. Mysteries are supposed to be solvable by the reader or the audience. The clues, located by the detective, should be available to the audience as well. Not here.
That’s not to say the film is bad. The acting is great. Robert Morley in particular has a wonderful time, although how he got thrown from his fractious horse without breaking every bone in his body is another good question.
You’ll probably enjoy Murder at the Gallop, as long as you pretend it has nothing to do with Agatha’s novel. But only once. You won’t be able to ignore the plot holes big enough to ride a horse through the second time around.
