Teresa Reviews “The Affair at the Victory Ball” (1991)
Fidelity to text: 4 butter knives
The major changes made the episode more television-worthy. Sadly, they omitted the doctor’s opinion and rigor mortis.
Quality of movie on its own: 4 butter knives
This is a fun one, with fancy dress, fine porcelain collectibles, baying reporters, and Poirot seeing his name on the front page but not the way he likes.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
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“The Affair at the Victory Ball” was Agatha’s first published short story staring Hercule Poirot, written after “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” saw print. Many of her regular tropes appear in this story. Hastings resides with Poirot and reads the newspaper looking for things to discuss. Poirot expects everyone to know who he is and many people do. Inspector Japp comes calling, asking for help. Poirot stages a theatrical and dramatic unveiling of the murderer.
But it’s a rather static story. The movie jazzes it up considerably.
It opens with the camera panning across an expensive set of porcelain collectibles (much finer and far rarer than any mass-market collectible of today). Poirot tells us what we’re seeing and gives us a bit of history. It’s a set of Commedia dell’arte figurines dating back to popular theater in Renaissance Italy. The characters are stock, identified by their costumes. They are Harlequin, Columbine, Punchinello, Pulcinella, Pierrot, and Pierrette. They’re comic but also tragic because none of them can escape the roles life sets for them.
From there, we go to Hastings larking about the flat, looking forward to the Victory Ball. The ball celebrates the end of WWI. When Agatha wrote the story in 1923, WWI and its jaw-dropping carnage was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Despite the producers resetting virtually the entire Poirot canon to the mid-1930s, everyone in England still remembered WWI vividly, either directly (less than 20 years had passed) or from listening to everyone older talking about it. To make the Victory Ball even more poignant, virtually everyone in 1935 was afraid of the war that was coming and hoping to avert it. This is the backdrop to Neville Chamberlain signing the appeasement treaty with Hitler on 30 September 1938, proclaiming “peace in our time.”
Hastings is attending, naturally. He begs Poirot to come along, because he’s got a friend in BBC radio who wants to meet the great detective. Learning that a major fan is dying to meet him lures Poirot away from his stamp collection. He does not, however, go in costume. He’s a famous person and feels no need to dress up. Hastings, for his part, attends as Sir Percival Blakeney. It’s perfect costuming for Hastings as Sir Percy is widely known as an idiot whose sole concern is his exquisite tailoring.
At the ball, Poirot and Hastings have a grand time with Hastings’ radio friend, James Ackerley. The ball becomes even more interesting when Viscount Cronshaw arrives with his party, all in full Commedia dell’arte regalia. They’re unhappy enough to squabble in public. Poirot witnesses Harlequin bickering with Columbine and then watches the lady leave in a huff with Pierrot. At the unmasking, hours later, Harlequin is seen on the upper balcony. Minutes later, he’s found in a supper room, a table knife plunged into his chest. Who could have killed him in a building full of witnesses?
As Chief Inspector Japp says, he’ll need to use Albert Hall to have enough room to interview all the potential suspects.
This is where the episode fell down for me. I had a few issues. The first is that even though I know Japp regards Poirot as a valued colleague, it’s hard for me to buy that he’d let Poirot (and Hastings!) examine the body before the police arrives. Scotland Yard had a forensics team by then; we’ve seen it in earlier episodes.
The second issue is the body’s stiffness. In the short story, this is spelled out and a logical reason is provided. The doctor comments on the unusual stiffness of the body but he wasn’t asked to estimate time of death. Instead, the doctor was told that Viscount Cronshaw had just been knifed mere minutes ago. Thus, it isn’t immediately apparent that Viscount Cronshaw had been murdered some time earlier and the body stashed until it was needed. There’s also the issue of blood. There wasn’t any. There’d be some evidence to show that his body had been tucked into the niche behind the curtain, but no. Those issues are glossed over.
Sometimes it seems that Inspector Japp and Scotland Yard get to show off their modern forensics and police procedures only when the plot calls for it and not otherwise. But that’s a minor quibble in an otherwise excellent episode.
There’s also Mrs. Davidson, who was costumed as Pierrette. She’s a cipher. I’m guessing from visual hints in the film that she’s probably a downtrodden wife who doesn’t dare contradict her actor husband (who dressed as Pierrot). She loves her husband or she’s afraid of him or both. When Poirot and Hastings visit her, she lies to cover up what he did, despite the fact that he implicated her in the murder! But we’re not given a reason why Mrs. Davidson would do this so, like I said, I’m guessing.
There’s also the ending which some reviewers didn’t like. It worked for me despite the fact that it wouldn’t have held up in court, even in 1935. It worked because it referred back to the opening scenes in the radio station and circled back to the fact that because you thought you saw something doesn’t mean you actually did. Poirot likes a dramatic unveiling of the murderer so he gets all the suspects into the radio station studio and brings on actors wearing the costumes worn earlier at the Victory Ball. Looking at the costumes, only one person could have made the quick change necessary to become Harlequin and then vanish.
But watch so you can make the discovery yourself. Along the way, enjoy Eustace Beltaine, hordes of baying reporters, and a loud, brassy, American widow who’s on the make for a rich English husband. It looks like she landed one too, courtesy of murder.
