Teresa Reviews Murder Is Easy (2015)

Teresa reviews Murder Is Easy (2015), an episode titled Un Meurtre est-il facile? (Is a Murder Easy?) from Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie, and found it a mostly faithful adaptation when it wasn’t running off the rails.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 2 1/2 weapons
Even buried under a mass of loose ends and idiotic additions, you’ll recognize much of the plot.

Quality of movie: 2 ½ weapons
A return to form with plot threads that go nowhere, nonsensical behavior, and the sense the script was dashed off just before filming started.

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

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

Les Petits has returned to form, alas. It’s so uneven! I never know what to expect. But unlike, say ITV’s Marple, Season Two of Les Petits never rises to greatness when it plays fast and loose with the text, shoehorning in rhomboid characters followed by forcing them into oval holes.

Murder Is Easy has — to date — two previous adaptations despite there being loads of material to work with. The Bill Bixby version (1982) is reasonably faithful despite removing every bit of the remarkable occult shenanigans in the background. It’s also as flat as Bixby’s hair is fluffy.

ITV’s Marple episode inserted Miss Marple, which is forgivable because one old lady is much like another (as she’d be the first to tell you since old ladyhood is the most effective camouflage in the known world). It makes perfect sense Lavinia Pinkerton would confide in Miss Marple when they share a train compartment, one elderly sidelined woman to another, and that Miss Marple, upon hearing of Lavinia’s sudden death by automobile would race off to investigate. However, that episode sank into lunacy involving secret babies, political infighting, incest, and, once again, removing everything supernatural along with Inspector Battle.

I did not expect great things from Les Petits and I was not surprised, pleasantly or otherwise. Since our stars are Laurence, Marlène, and Avril, they needed to be shoehorned in, no matter how it stretched the plot out of shape.

Laurence was easy. He’s the investigating officer. After he realizes there’s a case, that is, because Marlène doesn’t pass on the information Josiane Lallin (Lavinia Pinkerton) tells her. I expect Marlène to be incompetent. What didn’t make sense was that Josiane (unpleasant old biddy division) didn’t stay to talk to Laurence after making a big fuss in the office that she had to speak to him. Nor did she speak to anyone else other than Marlène, despite being in a stationhouse full of policemen. This proves that Laurence is the only commissaire in Lille, despite it being a moderately sized city.

Avril gets rammed into Bridget Conway’s role. How, you ask, since she’s a lowly reporter writing the local agony column? Perhaps she’s seen by the press magnate who owns Le Voix du Nord and he sweeps her off her feet? Sort of. It seems she wrote a feature story on Emile Deboucke (Lord Whitfeld) and he, rich and elderly textile mill magnate, decides he wants her for his wife. Avril, three months behind on her rent and hating her job, agrees. She’s whisked off to Deboucke’s châteaux an hour away from Lille, installed in her own suite, dressed in the best of Chanel and Dior, and not required to provide any of the services normally expected from this kind of arrangement. Avril insists that Deboucke put a ring on it first.

As for Marlène? When Avril becomes Deboucke’s new creative director — a job for which she isn’t remotely qualified and everyone knows it — she hires Marlène away from toxic boss, Laurence.

Marlène’s other connection to the plot is Deboucke’s neighbor and librarian, Annick Devassène (Honoria Waynflete). She turns out to be a cousin. A cousin Marlène’s on familiar terms with? No. Annick is much older and they met once, at Marlène’s baptism. Once. There’s no indication they even exchange Christmas cards. This doesn’t stop Marlène from moving in with a total stranger when the plot demands it.

Was Josiane correct about murders at Deboucke’s textile mill? She was indeed. Michel, the factory foreman and union rabblerouser, was crushed under rolls of textiles while looking for the boss. Josiane falls to her death from a ladder while washing windows. Deboucke’s secretary, Sabine, falls from the mill roof but you’ll never learn why she was on the roof.

Jean Castor, manager, is poisoned with white phosphorus and shoved into a spiders’ web of thread but you won’t learn how he ingested the poison or how the murderer got him face first and up in the air into that high-tension thread.

You’ll learn the mill has union trouble but it comes across as generic Socialist unrest, because the plot demands it. There’s no Pajama Game (1957) strike over 7 ½ cents per hour. Men run the looms, but mysteriously, there’s also a sewing room full of female sewing machine operators despite textile mills not being garment factories. Textile mills supply garment factories but they don’t cut and sew clothes. Those women did not sew the clothes Deboucke gives to Avril. If they’re sewing anything, it’s bags to encase the yardage. The mill itself is interesting, because you don’t often see a real one on film.

Sabine the secretary has apparently released confidential documents, but you’ll never learn why or to whom. She’s also a crier, emotionally destroyed over every little thing. You’ll wonder why Deboucke keeps her on but you won’t get an explanation.

Jean Castor is an unpleasant manager who’s colluding with someone about something to destroy the textile mill but you’ll never learn who he’s working with.

You sort of get a reason why Michel (the rabblerouser) and Josiane (the char) had to die. They irritated Deboucke. How does Deboucke feel about the deaths? I’m not sure. Maybe it was bad subtitles but it seemed as though a) he didn’t care, b) assumed he was responsible in some way because of his godlike powers as a textile mill magnate, and also c) thought it was divine retribution on anyone who irritated him. That’s from the novel, by the way.

Our villainess didn’t get nearly enough time onscreen. Maybe that’s because it’s hard to believe a stout, sixtyish matron can climb on top of a fifteen-foot shelving unit loaded with heavy rolls of fabric and cut them free. I could see her pushing the ladder away just like I could see her shoving Sabine off the roof but how did she sneak about in the mill, unnoticed, once she got inside? The workers wore color-coded uniforms. I really can’t understand how she poisoned Castor and then bodily lifted him up into a high-tension thread web and the thread didn’t break. I also don’t know how Laurence detected white phosphorus as the method of death.

The ending didn’t work either. Recall that Avril agreed to marry Deboucke because she was three months behind on her rent and she had just quit her job in a huff. She was desperate. She completely makes herself over for him, including her hair, proving she does know how to dress other than as a student. Then, when she refuses to marry Deboucke (having returned to her senses), she goes back to her ratty garret apartment and it’s still hers. The landlord didn’t change the locks and move in another tenant. Did she get her job back? Did Deboucke pay her back rent and, in gratitude for clearing his name, pay her rent for the next year? You’ll never learn.