Teresa Reviews The Blue Geranium (2005)

Teresa reviews The Blue Geranium (2005) and thought the anime did a good job of conveying the poisonous (and poisoned) Mary Pritchard.

Source: DailyMotion

Fidelity to text: 4 poison bottles

The housemaids get the plot moving and Jean Instow is mostly gone, but everything else is there.

Quality of episode: 4½ poison bottles

Murder, the supernatural, hypochondria, curdled love, suspicion, Maybelle and her duck, and all in 25 minutes.

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

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

I’ll refer you to my review of ITV’s The Blue Geranium for my discussion of blue flowers and deceitful gardening catalog copywriters. Very few flowers — as Miss Marple and Maybelle know — are blue like their advertising claims. Primroses, hollyhocks, and geraniums are never blue. Thus, when primroses, hollyhocks, and geraniums on wallpaper turn blue overnight, you know something has gone very wrong.

And so it proves. The episode does an excellent job setting up Miss Marple and Maybelle’s investigation. Nervous, uneasy housemaids beg for aid. George Pritchard, the master of the house, is suspected of murdering his wife, and they helped fuel suspicion. Oddly, Nurse Copling is dressed like a maid, not a nurse. More oddly, she helps Mrs. Pritchard fuel her own superstitious paranoia.

For a kid’s cartoon, Mary Pritchard is a remarkable creation. She’s the image of a hateful, shrieking, hypochondriac wife that any man would contemplate murdering.

You can see why people are suspicious of poor George Pritchard. Why didn’t he move Mary to a hotel room after the primrose turned blue? Because he just couldn’t accept that the supernatural was anything other than claptrap. When the hollyhock mysteriously turns blue inside a locked room, just as the veiled psychic Madame Zarida insisted it would, he doubles down, insisting equally strongly that it’s impossible and if this keeps up, wife Mary will scare herself to death.

The third full moon arrives right on schedule, George insists that nothing will happen, and in the morning, he and Nurse Copling discover Mary’s dead body. A blue geranium also appears.

Fortunately for George, the guilty maids asked Miss Marple to come by and she confirms what he suspected all along. The supernatural was claptrap disguising mundane murder.