Teresa Reviews Murder Is Easy (2023)

Teresa reviews Murder Is Easy (2023) and was enjoying it until climax where the scriptwriters faltered.

(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 3 miscellaneous deaths (falling, drowning, car, poison, tree branch)

Inspector Battle’s still gone and so is antiques dealer Mr. Ellsworthy. Luke’s now from Nigeria, and all decent people loathe the empire.

Quality of film: 3 miscellaneous deaths

Despite the cha-cha-cha-changes, I was grooving along until the end when Luke backed away from Bridget instead of manning up.

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

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I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll ever get a faithful adaptation of Murder Is Easy (1939). One where Inspector Battle makes one of his rare appearances in the Christie canon. One where there’s witchcraft aplenty going on, led by occultist and antiques dealer Mr. Ellsworthy. One with the strong sense of class differences.

What we get this time is no Battle and no class differences. What’s left of the witchcraft subplot, including animal sacrifice, is relegated to Luke’s cover story that he’s visiting the village to compare rural English and Nigerian superstitions for a book. And instead of class differences, the film largely erased them, replacing them with commentary about the evilness of the British empire. When even military men like Major Horton describe the awfulness of his own culture is, you know you’ve moved into a parallel world.

At least Bridget Conway is still a lady before her father lost his money. Marrying Lord Whitfield, distasteful as he is, means she won’t be poor anymore. She’s still got a failed love affair behind her, but there’s no longer a sense that she’s come down in the world and wants to climb back up. Here, she’s played as a very smart girl who recognizes that marrying up is easy.

Also dropped by the wayside is Honoria Waynflete’s moneyed past. Like Bridget, she’s come down in the world, but the villagers still think of her as a lady. Lord Whitfield may be a lord (via wartime profiteering in cement manufacturing instead of newspapering), but he started out poor and humble, the bootmaker’s son.

Lord Whitfield’s supposed to be about the same age as Miss Waynflete (the film got this wrong) since he courted her, her!, the daughter of the Colonel. She was a radical who wanted to banish the class system and a smart woman who could see a man who was heading up when her own family was heading down. But the Colonel didn’t have to put a stop to the relationship. Miss Waynflete showed off her craziness to her betrothed and Lord Whitfield, still a poor lad, dumped her, sickened by her callous cruelty to her favorite pet.

This Honoria Waynflete gets rewritten but not enough to make it work. We barely spend any time with her. Most of the time, she’s in the background. If you don’t know who to look for, you’ll miss her completely. She seems to be working for Lord Whitfield in an archivist/curator capacity, but it wasn’t spelled out. Because she’s offstage so much, the feeling of surprised inevitability is lost. You’re only surprised, even feeling blindsided. I kept thinking of how much better Olivia de Havilland was in her Murder Is Easy (1982). She wasn’t a woman to accept being relegated to the background.

Luke Fitzwilliam transformed into a Nigerian expat who sounds like he just stepped out of Oxford instead of a Malayan expat who blended in better despite having spent his entire adult life in the back of beyond. Being a Nigerian expat allowed new, secondary characters in a London West African club to lecture Luke about how he should return to Nigeria and work for independence instead of getting a job at Whitehall working for his colonial overlord.

Note that word “should.” It shows up a lot. You should behave this way, think this way, and do as you’re told.

Other characters underwent radical changes. The reasonably competent Dr. Thomas becomes a toadying quack whose sole cure for the poor patients is lots of codeine. He’s also a eugenicist who believes in racial purity. Except why does he court Rose Humbleby, a mixed-race Indian who’s clearly not an English Rose? You aren’t given a reason. At least the doctor’s scientifically progressive views are not the product of a feverish scriptwriter. Agatha put similar words into Dr. Franklin and Judith Hastings’ mouths in Curtain (1975). They, too, disapprove of inferior humans being permitted to live their lives and favor eliminating poor physical specimens and undesirables.

The only “should” that should have happened is the scriptwriter writing a better plot. The first half of the film works; the setup is great! But the story falls apart in the second half. We don’t see enough of Miss Waynflete. We see plenty of Lord Whitfield, a complete idiot who’s too young to be Miss Waynflete’s beau from years ago. Luke has trouble fitting in and, at the same time, as a Nigerian in a small English village, it’s not enough. He’s a stranger in a strange land and should be noticed everywhere he goes. Instead, once they get to know him, the villagers accept him as one of their own.

In addition, the British police are complete fools who disregard the testimony of female witnesses. Much is made of the license plate number on the Rolls that Lavinia Pinkerton gets shoved under and how a woman reported it and the police did nothing. But in the novel, the police investigation proves that Lord Whitfield’s Rolls (that was his license number) was elsewhere at the time of the crime! They assume that the number was reported wrongly and since the report was a lie, they’re correct!

The unanswered questions keep piling up. Why morph Lydia Horton from a harridan whose death was a gift to her husband and their dogs to a fondly remembered woman grieved by all? Why did Mrs. Humbleby get upset when Luke tasked her about her relationship with Major Horton? Her husband was barely cold when that came up, but when you watch the show, there’s not a whisper of impropriety.

But I could live with these issues, if only for the pleasure of hearing a poem by Frances Cornford (1886-1960) quoted, something other films miss. The poem, “To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train” (1910) was carefully chosen by Agatha to reflect Miss Waynflete’s character.

Bridget misquotes:

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,

No one loves Miss Waynflete. Her bitterness curdled into insanity.

What I couldn’t live with was what they did to Luke and Bridget. Their blossoming relationship forms the heart of Murder Is Easy. He’s not from Wychwood. He’s seen the world. She’s trapped there and wants to get out. They work together to solve the murders. Of the four versions I’ve seen, this one shows Luke and Bridget falling believably into love. She doesn’t fall into his bed because the script demands it as in the 1982 version. Nor does she turn into a crazy Yank making crazy demands as in the 2009 film. They have a relationship, unlike the 2015 French version which rewrote the story completely to accommodate the three leads.

This Luke and Bridget radiate heat for each other from the moment he enters Wychwood and spots that hot redhead. She flirts with him. She takes him seriously. They grow believably closer, wanting each other. They kiss! As if they mean it!

And then, because the script demanded that he go back to Nigeria alone, they part! Not a word from Luke about “come with me because I love you.” She says she’s going to explore the world and doesn’t suggest that he show her Nigeria. Nothing. Everything they felt for each other vanishes like mist because the script couldn’t allow a black man to woo and marry a white woman. After all that blather about equality and a brave new world and choosing your own destiny, and you’re back in 1954, only in the American South.