Teresa Reviews “Ordeal by Innocence” (1985)

Teresa reviews “Ordeal by Innocence” (1985) and likes the Miss Marple version better.

Fidelity to text: 2 1/2 blunt objects

Hester gets youthened, Mary and Philip Durrant hate each other, Tina gets whitewashed, Maureen turns into a single slut and the changes just keep on coming.

Quality of film on its own: 2 1/2 blunt objects

Blurry, murky, shaky, poorly told, confusing, with loads of flashbacks, flash-sideways, and a truly dreadful soundtrack.

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

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

Let’s start with a reason to watch this mess: It’s shot on location in Dartmouth in Devon. It’s a town on the banks of the River Dart, a tidal ria stretching far inland. The scenery is gorgeous. The town clings to the steep hills lining the river. There are many, many boats from small rowboats to ferries to sailing ships gliding past in the background. The characters are constantly taking boats back and forth between Sunny Point and the town. There are plenty of scenes taking place on the docks so you’ll get your boating fix.

After that, the all-star cast does the best they can with a murky script.

Faye Dunaway portrays family matriarch Rachel Argyle in flashbacks. She was murdered two years before the movie opens. The director switched to black and white when any scene took place in the past.

Weirdly, Dunaway is only one year older than Sarah Miles, playing her daughter Mary Durrant. A non-similarity in appearance is to be expected since Rachel Argyle adopted all her children. However, it’s extremely noticeable that the actresses look like contemporaries and not mother and daughter.

It’s even more noticeable because Rachel Argyle’s other adopted children (Jacko, Mickey, Tina, and Hester) resemble teenagers and young adults, rather than Rachel’s fellow members of the Women’s League.

There’s also substantial differences in height. Donald Sutherland, 6 foot 4 (Arthur Calgary) towers over the rest of the cast and the camera angles make him look even taller. He’s six inches taller than the next tallest cast members, both 5 feet 10: Christopher Plummer (Leo Argyle) and Michael Elphick (Inspector Huish). When he’s standing next to Hester Argyle, he looks like a giant.

Hester’s been youthened to a fourteen-year-old, so her love story with Arthur disappeared. In exchange she was transformed into not just a snotty teenager but one who sneaks out to watch X-rated movies. I found this unbelievable because Maureen Clegg, Jacko’s widow, saw her sneak into the films on a regular basis. She’s the usher at the local cinema and one of her jobs is to keep nonpaying patrons out of the theater. She saw this and did nothing? I couldn’t accept it because Maureen would lose her job.

Maureen Clegg got turned into a slut. I cannot stand it when Hollywood decides that working-class women – by definition! — have loose morals. Maureen meets Calgary at the theater and hints around about Jacko and the goings on at Sunny Point. When we next see Maureen, she’s nude and in his hotel bed! Ready to get it on with a complete stranger! Why did she do this? Because she’s obviously no better than she should be and the director wanted to show some tit and he couldn’t do it with the classier citizens. Gratuitous nudity: what Hollywood does best because it’s easier than writing a decent script treating women as something other than brainless sex objects.

We first meet Tina Argyle in Mickey’s bed. It’s obvious she’s naked but at least she owns a sheet. Why does she get to stay decent? Because, despite being adopted from poverty and her obvious lack of money, she’s a lady. Tina also got whitewashed. In the novel, Tina is mixed-race from her Indian father and English mother. Here? That bit of complexity got erased. She also gets murdered; she survived the attempt in the novel.

Gwenda Vaughn, Leo’s secretary, lost her plot. In a flashback, Rachel accuses her of having an affair with her boss. Gwenda — who was in love with Leo — was supposed to be on the verge of marrying him when Calgary shows up to see justice done. Not here; despite what Rachel says, you’ll never see so much as a hint of impropriety in this boss/secretary relationship. Again, a weakening of the complexity of the Argyle household.

Inspector Huish becomes a typical dumb constable who refuses to see a miscarriage of justice. Yet he knows something that Calgary refuses to see: Jacko was guilty. Everyone in the family knew that Jacko was guilty. They lived with his bad seed behavior and murder didn’t surprise them. Doctor McMaster got disappeared, but in the novel, he explained to Calgary that Jacko might have been too cowardly to commit murder himself but he’d eagerly urge someone else to kill if it suited him.

Mary Durrant (Sarah Miles) got much older, turned into a lush, and cheated on her husband, Philip. Ian McShane (Philip) gets top billing for two scenes and gets murdered for his pains with no explanation given for why.

There were so many missed opportunities to explain what was going on. Why was Calgary pursued through the narrow streets of Dartmouth by a car with a clearly visible license plate? In the middle of the night? This plot thread goes nowhere. No one notices (the streets are suspiciously empty when needed for the plot), the fog miraculously clears so Calgary with his steel trap memory can get the plate number, yet he never tells the police? No one goes looking for the car?

There’s also the scene when Kirsten burns not one pair of gloves in the aga but what looks to be four pairs of gloves. This is a dead giveaway as to whodunnit but why four pairs? Why show her face?

The movie wasn’t just choppy. It was foggy. Really foggy. Like the director used every chunk of dry ice in England to up the atmospherics, except when Calgary needed to see something clearly and then not report it to the police.

There’s also the irritating, jarring, jazzy soundtrack. Dave Brubeck and his quartet performed the music yet it wasn’t written for the film. It seemed to belong to another movie entirely. The producers had a soundtrack, decided they didn’t like it, and hired Dave. He didn’t have time to write anything appropriate so they cobbled a soundtrack out of his other music and it shows. It’s like Frankenstein music. It had nothing to do with the plot, didn’t heighten action or emotion, and just … showed up as though a jazz quartet was hiding in the fog. Sometimes an offbeat soundtrack works. In Glynis John’s version of Spider’s Web, the music was incongruous and offbeat but so was she.

I don’t believe anyone in this version of Ordeal listened to jazz. No one had enough personality.

I can’t recommend you watch this other than for completeness. ITV’s 2007 production with Miss Marple (yes, they shoehorned in Miss Marple!) was so much better. Despite myriad changes, it beautifully captured the Shakespearean tragedy of a good man doing the right thing with fatal consequences. Stick with that version.

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