Teresa Reviews “Sleeping Murder” (1987)

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Fidelity to text: 4 garottes.
The producers didn’t change much, other than shifting the film’s time period to the early 1950s and compressing and removing minor characters. Everything important is present and accounted for.

Quality of movie on its own: 4 garottes.
There’s the usual problem of the film quality itself (16 mm doesn’t age well) and lack of subtitles. Other than those technical issues, this version of Sleeping Murder was well-paced, atmospheric, and I could follow it easily. The music score really added to the ambience. Still, there were questions that the plot chose not to answer.

Sleeping Murder was a treat after sitting through Joan Hickson’s last outing (Murder at the Vicarage). The producers got back on track and shot the film so you could see what was going on rather than watching dark shapes move against a darker background. It was sunny, a nice contrast to the very unsunny subject matter.

It always amazes me that people think Agatha writes cozies. She does not, proved again here. The implications of this film’s murderer and his motives are unsettling. If he can’t have the object of his obsession, no one can. This is also one of the very few Agatha Christie stories that doesn’t involve money as a major subtext and driving issue. It’s all passion and obsession here; wanting what you can’t and shouldn’t have.

This story also plays into the theme of old sins having long shadows. Those sins can be remembered in strange, unexpected ways.

Which is why we get the stunning coincidence of Gwenda Reed, newlywed expat from New Zealand, finding the perfect house in a quaint village on the English coast. It’s a house that is strangely and startlingly familiar in odd ways. The musical score, something I don’t normally notice in a made-for-TV film, played this up nicely without being over the top. It was cinematic. Normally, TV productions have forgettable scores.

I really have no criticisms of this adaptation, except that it was too short. There were all kinds of motivations and reasons that were missing, hence a score of four garottes instead of more. I don’t know if this was due to the screenwriter playing fast and loose with the text or if Agatha didn’t spell it out in the novel. She wrote Sleeping Murder during the London Blitz and set it aside in a vault (along with Curtain, Hercule Poirot’s last case) to help her family financially should she not survive. Agatha was at the height of her writing skills, writing complex, well-plotted and detailed mysteries. She didn’t slow down until the late sixties.

So why then do we not get more of an explanation of Helen Spenlove Kennedy Halliday’s motives? That’s Gwenda’s mysteriously vanished stepmother. Everyone says she ran off with another man. Everyone implied that she was crazy about men and loose with her affections.

Miss Marple would tell you to never believe what anyone says. She never does. She expects people to misremember, shade the truth, and outright lie and she’s right.

I could figure out (especially after the big reveal) why Helen ran away from the quaint village all the way to India to marry Walter Fane, boring solicitor, who’d relocated to India himself. She was desperate to leave. Why didn’t she marry Walter Fane? Because she’d had a torrid affair with a married man on the ship from England to India and discovered she didn’t want to settle?

Well, okay. Even so, while marrying Walter Fane might not have been the best choice, it was a far better choice than remaining in that quaint little village. She got to leave that obsessed man in the dust.

But Helen said no to Walter Fane on the dock in some port in India.

She boarded another ship and sailed back to England which made no sense. At that point, Helen met Gwenda’s father, Kelvin Halliday, widower with little girl. They fall in love (those shipboard romances! Someone should write a novel) and marry. Okay.

Except they return to England, the place that Helen wanted to leave. Still okay. England’s a big place. Not as big as the United States but it’s certainly large enough that there were a number of counties, cities, towns, and villages to choose from.

Yet Helen agrees to return to the quaint little English seaside village that she couldn’t run away from fast enough. And, let me remind you, for very good reasons. Was this her new husband’s decision and she went along? We don’t know.

This is really important to me, because Helen’s motivations are what drive the plot. Why did she flee the village? Why did she return? Why did she — apparently — flee again with some other man in the dead of night?

We are not given any kind of explanation for Helen’s motives. Yet if she had not returned to the quaint English seaside village, everything would have been different for her, her husband, and her little stepdaughter. For one thing, she might not have vanished in the night, leaving behind a husband who think’s he strangled her and dies a suicide and a traumatized stepdaughter who gets shipped off to relatives in New Zealand.

I don’t have a problem with the unlikeliness of this plot mechanism. I swallowed whole the three-book series about four midgets trekking across a wilderness to throw a ring into a volcano. But I expect reasonably plausible, internally consistent explanations for why the characters do what they do.

I understood Gwenda’s motivations. She wanted to find out what happened and why this mysterious house that she had never seen before triggered memories. She had a chance to learn the secrets hidden from her for her entire life. I understood her husband’s motivations. He wanted his wife to be happy and he was fascinated too.

I understood everyone else’s motivations, from gardeners to former housemaids to lawyers to shop assistants to former friends and lovers. They all made sense.

Miss Marple’s motivations made sense. She knew to let sleeping dogs lie and what would come of disturbing them. Since no one took her good advice and those dogs got roused, she wanted to solve the crime and prevent another crime from happening to Gwenda and Giles.

But we were not told Helen’s motivations. This is one of those opportunities that a good scriptwriter can take and run with. If it’s not spelled out in the book or glossed over or omitted entirely, the adaptation can tell the full story. This is why sometimes (but not always) the movie can be better than the book.

Heresy, I know. But it’s true. If you’ve ever seen Legally Blonde and then hunted down the novel it was based on, you’ll know what I mean. The movie was about one hundred times better than the novel. The concept was there, but every part of the film was better than the novel.

The Agatha project has already proved this concept as well, believe it or not. The 2011 version of The Blue Geranium — a very early Miss Marple short story — was far superior to the source material. It can be done.

Sadly, it wasn’t done here. I can’t blame it on time limitations either because the BBC presents longer adaptations when they want to. Sleeping Murder was 102 minutes long. That’s not a lot of time to fully flesh out everyone’s motivations and yet, other than Helen’s, they managed.

Despite that issue, Sleeping Murder succeeded and it is a worthy addition to the Christie film canon. I didn’t question Helen’s motivations while watching the film. This came afterwards, while Bill and I were walking around the block on our nightly constitutional. It’s a reminder that Alfred Hitchcock, who knew a thing or two about successful movies, was right. When a screenwriter said the story wasn’t logical, Hitch said, “I’m not interested in logic, I’m interested in effect. If the audience ever thinks about logic, it’s on their way home after the show, and by that time, you see, they’ve paid for their tickets.”

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