Teresa Reviews “Spider’s Web” (1982)

Fidelity to text: 5 blunt objects

Agatha gets sole writing credit, so you know this is a line-for-line reading of the original play.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 blunt objects

This never came to life for me. Clarissa is supposed to be the effervescent, unbelievable, manic pixie dream girl. This Clarissa wasn’t it.

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

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

Bill and I have slowly worked our way from 1929 (Die Abenteurer G.m.b.H.) to the present and here we are at 1982 and Spider’s Web. I’d seen the 1960 version with the longer title of The Spider’s Web starring Glynis Johns so I knew what to expect.

By 1953, Agatha had written seven plays. She’d developed a good understanding of what worked on stage and what didn’t. As always, she liked changing things up and surprising her audience. Thus, when film actress Margaret Lockwood asked for a comic mystery as a starring theatrical vehicle, Agatha got her chance to try something new. Lockwood didn’t want to portray an evil femme fatale; she’d done enough of that in the movies. For her return to the stage, she wanted to be funny, frothy, effervescent, yet still involved in murder. The victim had to be someone for whom the phrase “justifiable homicide” was invented.

Agatha delivered in 1954 with Spider’s Web and the character of Clarissa Hailsham-Brown. I’ll assume Margaret Lockwood was suitably dazzling, ditzy, and off-kilter on onstage. I don’t believe there are recordings of her playing Clarissa. Whatever Margaret Lockwood did, she set the tone for how Clarissa should be portrayed.

I envision Clarissa as a vivacious live wire who lives at 37° askew from the rest of us. She’s the second wife of Henry Hailsham-Brown, a stuffy diplomat in the Foreign Service, so there had to be a reason why someone concerned about his career would fall head-over-heels in love with a wildly unsuitable woman, particularly when his first marriage ended dramatically in adultery, drug abuse, child abuse, and everything else you could think of.

None of it was Henry’s fault. It was his evil ex-wife, Miranda, who ran off with the aforementioned smarmy victim of justifiable homicide. You would think that after an experience like that, Henry would choose to marry the most suitable of wives and not a British version of Lucy Ricardo. Yet he married Clarissa, making her his traumatized daughter’s stepmother.

Clarissa is the center of Spider’s Web. If you can’t buy her as a manic pixie dream girl who everyone is convinced is lying when she’s telling the truth and telling the truth when she’s lying, the role doesn’t work and the play doesn’t sparkle. The actress playing Clarissa is vital. She makes the reactions of everyone else onstage believable.

Penelope Keith didn’t work for me. Not the way Glynis Johns did. I could see why Henry would fall in love with either version although his reasons would be wildly different (sex appeal and fun versus well-bred competence). I could not, for one minute, buy Penelope as a ditz who lived in a world of her own. She came across as very capable, almost no-nonsense. Slightly prone to flights of fancy, yes, but mainly because the plot demanded it. She didn’t radiate goofiness and joie de vivre the way Glynis Johns did. She was impeccably groomed, impeccably dressed, and moved like she’d spent her adolescence strapped to a backboard while learning how to walk without the book falling from her head.

With the center of the play not quite right, I had more time to notice what else did or didn’t work. Remember, I’ve got the 1960 version for comparison.

The rest of the cast was fine, but I couldn’t help wonder how this police inspector would have reacted to Glynis. It felt like he had to disbelieve a regal queen — because the plot demanded he do so — when he wanted to believe her. Inspector Lord had a much easier time dealing with the rest of the cast. They felt real. His refusal to believe the lady of the manor’s story did not.

Spider’s Web started life as a play, something both versions took into account when filming. Weirdly, they went in different directions. The 1960 version is obviously filmed on a stage set, right down to obviously painted backdrops instead of real furniture or bookshelves. The cameraman staked out his position and never moved again, making for a very static set.

Yet, at the same time, the 1960 version went outside. It went upstairs to find the body under the bolster. It had breakfast on the veranda. It even entered Miss Peake’s cottage and checked out her double-dug trench. In other words, despite the house being a stage set, it was a stage set that grew into the larger world.

The 1982 version confined itself — other than one short scene and an opening shot of the mansion — to the stage set. You get the library, the drawing room, the connecting hallway to the front door, and the secret passage. The cameraman moved with the cast and those were real rooms, down to real draperies at the windows instead of painted facsimiles. Yet it was a far more static set because you never saw anything else other than those two rooms.

The 1960 version had a bright, bouncy, jazzy score that was often wildly at odds with the action. But it was memorable, and if you wanted to emphasize that Clarissa was 37° askew from the rest of humanity, the musical score did its part. The 1982 version had music. I think. It was blandly appropriate and utterly forgettable and had nothing to do with Clarissa. Music can provide a subtle clue to the audience: this person is the hero, that person is the villain, that guy over there is the lucky, plucky sidekick. This next scene is going to be dramatic and scary so girls, hold on to your boyfriends! Not here.

Even the opening credits in 1960 were off-balance, with its animated spider policemen coping with criminal flies, informing the audience that it was now in Clarissa’s world. This version? The usual, as per the standard contract.

The entire point of the play and the subsequent films was to be amusing and frothy. This is a parody of classic English country house murders where nothing is taken too seriously because the victim had it coming. Will Clarissa suffer from coping with a dead body, peril to her husband’s career, and the knowledge that her stepdaughter was experimenting with voodoo? Glynis Johns would rise above it, unconcerned and unaffected. Penelope Keith would cope, manage, and spend time in therapy and writing in her diary.

Should you watch this version? It depends on the Clarissa you want: manic pixie dream girl who will drive you crazy and make you laugh? Or someone sane but capable of flights of fancy if the situation warrants it.

(Spider’s Web is available on YouTube.)