Teresa Reviews “See How They Run” (2022)

Teresa reviews “See How They Run” (2022) and thinks you’ll enjoy it if you like Agatha and movies that ask you to pay attention.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to life: 2 ½ hatchets

The Mousetrap, the clause in the movie production contract, the tragic child murders, and the serial killer are real. So are much of the cast.

Quality of movie: 4 ½ hatchets

If you’re familiar with Christie World and like meta, stagy, clever, self-referential movies, you’ll love it. If you don’t, you won’t.

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

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

If you like “See How They Run,” you’ll watch it several times to get all the in-jokes, the references to Agatha, and to appreciate how the film refers back to itself like a Mobius strip, where the climax duplicates what the seedy director story-boarded as being the correct climax to a mystery movie. It’s arch and very much a film for people who love Golden Age mysteries, the theater, writers wrestling with Hollywood over their vision, and clever movies about the movies. If you don’t belong to one of those categories, this movie will drive you mad.

Since the movie is set in the real world, Let’s address what is real. The Mousetrap opened on 6 October 1952 and was a hit from day one. It was loosely inspired by the tragic, systematic abuse and eventual murder of Dennis O’Neil, 12, on 9 January 1945, while in Britain’s foster care system. His younger brothers survived. What happens to the surviving children who depended on adults to look out for them but fail them instead? Agatha ran with the idea.

The Rillington serial killer was real too. In March of 1953, about when The Mousetrap would have hit its 100th performance, the strangled bodies of several women were discovered in a papered-over alcove in a dilapidated boarding house where John Reginald Halliday Christie (1899-1953) lived. This Christie, unrelated to Agatha, had long history of offenses. More bodies were found around the property and in the back garden.

What’s worse, Christie earlier was involved in a miscarriage of justice. In 1948, the bodies of Beryl Evans and her infant daughter, Geraldine, were found on the same property. Christie was the star witness for a criminally botched investigation including rampant police corruption, and a prosecution that ended in Beryl’s innocent husband, Timothy Evans, being hung in 1950.

This time around, the police were under immense pressure to get it right and not railroad some innocent man to the gallows because it was easy. That’s why Inspector Stoppard, a functioning alcoholic who’s not very good at his job, and a raw newbie constable got assigned what should have been a high-profile case involving Hollywood directors, big-name stars, and Agatha Christie, the biggest name of them all. Commissioner Harold Scott (a real person who ran the Metropolitan Police from 1945 to 1953) is under pressure from the Home Office to play nice with the theater people and solve the case while still focusing all his efforts and manpower on finding the Rillington Place rapist and strangler.

Many of the people associated with The Mousetrap are real. Richard “Dickie” Attenborough and his wife, Sheila Sim, were the original stars. Petula Spencer was based on Peter Saunders, the theater impresario who drove the bargain with real producer, John Woolf, about filming rights. That clause in the contract about not beginning filming until after the play had been out of the West End theater for at least six months? That’s real too. When Woolf signed that contract at the behest of Peter Saunders, he, like everyone else, didn’t expect The Mousetrap to run forever. His second wife, Edana Romney, was real too. They divorced in 1955, and he married Ann Saville, who may or may not have been his personal assistant. Certainly the names match.

Agatha is real.

So is her husband, Max Mallowan although he wasn’t black. But in this parallel world, why not? Lucian Msamati made a much better Max Mallowan than Jonah Hauer-King in Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar (2019). Equally real is Agatha’s distaste for public appearances so her sending a cake for the 100th performance would be in character.

The seedy director, Leo Kopernick, isn’t real but he perfectly emulates countless Hollywood directors who understand that plays aren’t movies and the point of a movie is to sell millions of tickets and boring movies won’t do that. His storyboard of his vision proves his point.

The artsy writer, Mervyn Cocker-Norris, isn’t real either, but he emulates countless writers with an artistic vision who get chewed up by Hollywood, leaving them drunken failures living on destroyed dreams. He’s appalled by Leo’s storyboard as it’s exactly the sort of tawdry, clichéd ending he abhors.

The film is loaded with Easter eggs about Christie and her world. Start with Inspector Stoppard, who was named for the playwright who wrote The Real Inspector Hound, a one-act play satirizing The Mousetrap. An especially nice one is near the climax, when the murderer invades Agatha’s home and takes everyone hostage. Agatha, wanting to save the day, finds the rat poison and poisons one cup of tea out of the set of tea cups. This is how you know it’s not the real Agatha. If she needed to poison a home invader without killing one of the guests, she’d have discreetly marked the cup (how the handle was oriented compared to the rest or an extra lump of sugar on the saucer or something). But this one didn’t and the butler, Fellows (named after Julian Fellows of Downton Abbey fame) dies.

What the scene references is Curtain (1975), also played out in Murder by the Book (1987). In Curtain, Mrs. Franklin poisons a cup of coffee. She’s entertaining her husband and some friends in their room. She sets out the coffee cups on a tray on a revolving bookcase/table, the critical cup arranged so her husband takes it. The group is momentarily distracted and Hastings innocently spins the table to retrieve a book from underneath. Since Mrs. Franklin didn’t mark the poisoned cup, and didn’t know the table was spun, she drinks the poisoned coffee instead of her husband. In Murder by the Book, Agatha and Poirot spar in a dream sequence and she, similarly, tries to poison his cocoa but not her own.

Agatha might have smacked a murderous home invader on the back of his head with a snow shovel, while trying to defend herself, her husband, and her guests. No matter what the provocation, I don’t believe she’d have then tried to decapitate the home invader with the snow shovel.

It all works out in the end exactly as Leo storyboarded for converting The Mousetrap into a film. Inspector Stoppard and Constable Stalker separately work out that Dennis the usher is the murderer. They race, separately, to Agatha’s home to confront Dennis and coincidentally, rescue the threatened, uninvited guests whom Dennis also wants to murder. Stoppard brings his military service revolver (because police in Britain are traditionally unarmed), Stalker her eagerness, and the climax plays out, complete with Molotov cocktails, last-minute leaps in front of a gunshot, and the detective cradling his injured partner.

The film was sometimes too clever and too subtle. It needed to be a little longer and a little less subtle so dumb viewers like me could have understood what was going on. But I’ll rewatch it! That won’t be a hardship.