Teresa Reviews “One Two Buckle My Shoe” (1992)

Teresa reviews “One Two Buckle My Shoe” (1992) and finds the unfortunate opening spoils an otherwise faithful adaptation.

Fidelity to text: 4 guns

Dropped characters to streamline the text for film, a minor adjustment in date, and a very different opening that reveals critical aspects of the plot.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 guns

Some of the plot didn’t make any sense. I’m also very unsure about that opening sequence: It’s atmospheric, creepy, explains the nursery rhyme to everyone who’s forgotten it, and reveals too much.

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

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One, Two, Buckle My Shoe is a complex novel, and not merely because of a convoluted plot involving accidents of fate and knowing which dentist a stranger would visit. That plot point never got explained, by the way. This mistake is even more glaring in the film.

Where the novel gets really interesting is in the politics. It was published in November of 1940 which means (due to the enormous lag between writing and publishing) that Agatha wrote it well before the Blitz began. I don’t know if she finished writing before 3 September 1939, the day Great Britain and France declared war upon Germany. Traditional publishing took years between finishing the manuscript, multiple rounds of edits, galleys for one last read through, proofreading, and finally, publication and going on sale at the bookshop around the corner.

Agatha generally didn’t tie her books to current events. They’re contemporaries but they don’t require the reader to peruse the London Times from front to back to understand the background. Yet One, Two must have already felt dated. Frank Carter is an angry young working-class man and he’s a member of the Blackshirts in the film. But the organization (the British Union of Fascists founded by Sir Oswald Mosley in 1932) had been banned by the British government by May of 1940, well before publication. The Poirot series sets virtually every episode in the mid-1930s so shifting the date back a few years works perfectly.

The novel also features an angry young man from America who’s a hardcore Red. That’s Howard Raikes, Jane Olivera’s boyfriend. Like Frank Carter, Raikes is in favor of burning everything to ash and rubble so a brave new shining city upon the hill can be erected, humanity perfected, and people he considers subhuman exterminated. He tells Poirot this. He gets dropped from the film.

The central character is Alistair Blunt, supremely important financier, conservative (but not a hardcore right-winger like Frank Carter), thoughtful, cautious, orderly. Frank and Howard may not agree on much but they do agree on this: Alistair Blunt is the enemy. He’s so much of an enemy that if Frank, Howard, and Alistair met unexpectedly in a dark alley, Frank and Howard would be hard-pressed to say who to shoot first: their counterpart on the wrong side of the political equation? Or Blunt?

Poirot approves of Blunt. He loathes Frank and Howard, seeing them as opposite sides of the same authoritarian coin. Since the film dispensed with Howard (can’t have evil lefties in Hollywood and it simplified the plot), that leaves Poirot with a choice: maintaining the status quo or coming down on the side of innocence, no matter how distasteful that person is. Frank Carter is distasteful! Even though he’s been made more sympathetic in the film (read the novel), it’s obvious what will eventually happen to him and Gladys Neville, Mr. Morley’s secretary. Frank’s going to beat Gladys on a regular basis, live off her earnings, and eventually, he’ll murder her or she’ll flee for her life.

Everyone — other than Gladys — agrees that Frank Carter is a wrong ’un. And they’re right to do so! But did he murder Mr. Morley, dentist? Did he attempt to murder Alistair Blunt? He doesn’t appear to be involved in the deaths of Mr. Amberiotis and Mabelle Sainsbury Seale. Poirot has to make a hard choice. The climax (other than adding the entire cast as witnesses) is remarkably faithful to the final conversation between Poirot and Blunt.

What is the right thing to do? Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Should justice prevail? Who will guard the guardians? Agatha rarely gets credit for the subtlety of her writing or thinking. You could say — since dentistry is involved — that like a decayed tooth, corruption from within will eventually undermine and destroy the moral stance you support. And so it proves here.

The film did a good job encapsulating the novel’s complexity. But there were poor choices. If you pay attention to the creepy, atmospheric opening, you’ll know the dentist was murdered. You won’t be thinking suicide like Chief Inspector Japp. You’ll know that there’s a connection between events in India twelve years ago and London, something that no one onscreen twigs to until much later on. Watching the scene from Much Ado About Nothing should tell you that deception, trickery, and masks are going to figure prominently in the episode.

Most of all, you’ll wonder why on God’s green earth Mr. Amberiotis chose Mr. Morley as his dentist.

It was critical for the plot that he do so, but the screenwriter didn’t come up with a reason for him choosing Mr. Morley when London is full of dentists.

The novel glosses over this too, but the novel does imply that time passed between the critical chance meeting in the street and murder day at the dentist. This was time used to plan the murder. In the film, it looks like the crime took place on the spur of the moment, right after Mr. Amberiotis began blackmailing Alistair Blunt. Similarly, the novel lets a month elapse before Mabelle Sainsbury Seale’s body is discovered. In the film, it’s like a day passed.

One, Two is still worth watching, just to see Poirot agonize over saving a worthless example of humanity (delightfully played by a pre-Doctor Who Christopher Eccleston). There are unexpected bonuses too. The first (for me) was finally learning courtesy of Chief Inspector Japp clipping his privets why hedge shears are bent. It’s so you can lean over the hedge and trim the far side! Decades of gardening and I never knew that. I also caught a gardening mistake. Alistair Blunt lives in a modernistic horror of a house. Based on its design and the time period of the show, the house must have been recently built. Yet that vine covering the sides took decades to grow. I’m guessing the homeowner refused to have his vine stripped off the house for TV verisimilitude.

There’s also the lovely, appropriate, vaguely cubist/Art Deco portrait hanging behind Alistair Blunt in many of the scenes. That’s him and his deceased wife, Rebecca, and painted in the style of Tamara de Lempicka, a famous society artist of the period. The studio artist combined two of her paintings into this portrait and did a fabulous job.

Read the novel first. You’ll know who did it (which the film opening tells you anyway) but you’ll be able to follow the plot.

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