Teresa Reviews “Taken at the Flood” (2006)
Teresa reviews “Taken at the Flood” (2006) and finds that the changes in time and plotting created a damp squib of an effect.
Fidelity to text: 3 gas explosions
The plot remains but the date change completely alters the characters and their motivations for the worse.
Quality of movie on its own: 3 gas explosions
Great looking and cast as usual, but it’s not long enough. How did Poirot know?
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movies on her podcast.
Agatha wrote contemporaries but she tended not to tie them to specific dates. She tucked current cultural references into the text but if you don’t know a bit of trivia, it doesn’t affect your enjoyment.
This is not true of Taken at the Flood (also titled There is a Tide).
Like N or M?, the date is critical to understanding why the characters act the way they do. N or M? (published in November 1941) was written during the early days of World War II. No one knew what was going to happen. Great Britain declared war in September 1939, soon followed by Dunkirk and then the horrors of the blitz. The U. S. didn’t enter the war until 7 December 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Taken at the Flood deals with WWII’s aftermath. The war’s over but England’s been shaken up like a snow globe in a mixer; shaken until it shattered into jagged glass confetti. Veterans who found an honored role during wartime no longer had one in peacetime. Survivors had to come to terms with what they did, mourn their dead, and rebuild. Taxes, rationing, and death duties were destroying what was left of the economy. The empire on which the sun never set was collapsing (the British pulled out of India in 1947).
At the same time, the upheavals and disruptions meant someone fast and ruthless could radically change their life for the better.
The title is taken from Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3. Brutus is speaking:
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
In simpler words, seize the chance you’ve been given and don’t look back.
David Hunter’s sister is Rosaleen. She’s a young, pretty widow when she meets the much older Gordon Cloade. They fall in love and after a whirlwind shipboard romance, marry in 1944. They arrive in London and two days later, before his family can meet her and he can rewrite his will, his mansion is blown apart in a bombing raid. The only survivors are Rosaleen, a victim of blast, and her brother, David.
A victim of blast – something Agatha would have known because it happened all around her – would have the clothes torn off their body, be bloody and bruised (at a minimum), and possibly suffer brain damage. They’d be shocked and dazed.
David, former commando, was very happy when his sister married a rich, old man. But when the bombs tore apart his new brother-in-law’s mansion, he was given a golden moment with which to rewrite his future for the better. That’s because Rosaleen didn’t survive the blast, but a young Irish housemaid named Eileen did. If he could coax Eileen, concussed and in the hospital, to pretend to be Rosaleen, they were rich. Rosaleen inherited Gordon’s millions and Gordon’s family – since he hadn’t updated his will – were out in the cold.
At the same time, the Cloade family struggled. The war disrupted every part of their lives. Men who stayed behind like Rowley wrestled with survivor’s guilt. He didn’t fight, but his farming partner and best friend did and died. His fiancée, Lynn, went to war as a Wren and saw the world. Gordon’s brothers, too old to fight other than in the home guard did all the work and then some. Lionel, a doctor, becomes addicted to morphine trying to cope with neuralgia stemming from exhaustion and overwork.
Like everyone else, the Cloades (and Major Porter) saw their incomes halved, their investments vanish, and their bills double.
Now change the setting from 1947 to 1937 and all that underlying stress and motivation go away. The family still wants its promised inheritance but there’s much less sympathy. The script then proceeds to make them even less sympathetic. Dr. Lionel becomes a feckless drug addict. His wife, Kathy, is no longer merely a loony spiritualist. She makes vicious, obscene phone calls to Rosaleen but the script never tells us why. Lynn comes home from medical missionary work in Africa (never mind the need in London), which she did largely to escape boring Rowley and her dull future, and not because she was a patriotic young woman.
The entire family shows zero compassion to Rosaleen, widowed after Gordon is killed when their mansion explodes because of a gas leak.
A gas leak? Yes, that’s how Gordon dies right after his marriage to Rosaleen and before the family can meet her. That would be plausible since David transforms into an engineer, used to handling explosives. Except! Somehow, despite the gas leak killing at least ten people, including millionaire Gordon, the examination doesn’t reveal the presence of explosives until Poirot needs it to prove his case and then – suddenly! The forensic evidence appears.
David Hunter becomes far more bullying than in the novel, to the point that I couldn’t understand why Lynn falls madly in love with him. Remember, she’s been getting letters from home. All her relatives think he’s a nasty piece of work and tell her so. She sees how he treats Rosaleen, keeping her firmly under his thumb. So naturally, since Lynn doesn’t want a hardworking, stable, decent man, she falls for David seconds after they meet.
Since David’s not psychotic enough, blowing up a mansion of people, the script makes him crazier. He’s apparently deeply angry over Rosaleen marrying Gordon, because she’s his first and only true love. Yep, a touch of incest to enhance the script. Never mind that Rosaleen had already married Robert Underhay and been widowed.
Which leads me to ask if Robert Underhay was a famous enough explorer to get a story about him in the newspaper (Poirot shows us the headline), how come no one has a photograph when it comes time to identify the body?
Or how about this? If Lionel substituted castor oil for morphine, why didn’t Rosaleen taste it when she sucked down the ampules?
And how did Poirot know that evil David not only got poor, fake Rosaleen pregnant, he forced her to have an abortion? The only clue is when she sings at the inquest:
“Your baby has gone down the plughole
Your baby has gone down the plug.
Throughout the film, Poirot’s angry at the Cloades and David. He should have been angry at the script. One more pass and a few more minutes of runtime would have solved these issues.
