Teresa Reviews “The Fourth Man” (1982)

Teresa Reviews “The Fourth Man” (1982) and could not accept why anyone would put up with evil Annette

Fidelity to text: 3 chokers
There’s a lot more backstory for Annette, Félicie, and Raoul.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 chokers
It dragged. Worse, I couldn’t understand why Félicie and Raoul were so entranced by Annette.

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

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This story is a weirdy, one of Agatha’s two dozen dives into the supernatural and paranormal. Since she wrote long before shapeshifter romance came into vogue (or hot, sexy vampires for that matter), her paranormal was based on what was popular at the time.

Ghosts. Or to be more precise, spirits. Spiritualism and the occult have a long and varied history in every culture going back as long as there are records. By the 19th century, researchers were trying to figure out if the soul was real. Where did it go? How much did it weigh? How do we communicate with those who have passed through the veil to the undiscovered country from which no man returns? Do we even want to?

You didn’t learn any of this history in school, of course. Spiritualism, despite being openly practiced by millions of people, is even more disreputable in public school history textbooks than religion is. You’d think that wars were never fought over differences of belief; that we’re all as rational as windup clockwork automatons. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would tell you differently. So would Sir Isaac Newton. He was a practicing alchemist but you didn’t learn about those research activities in physics class.

Agatha would too. Since she was a girl, she was haunted by a spirit she called “the Gunman.” This was an armed man who would show up in her vivid dreams. Only she could see him. He terrified her. But was he real? As a child of her times, she was well aware of the currents of spiritualism oozing about her. A boyfriend introduced her to theosophy. She didn’t think much of their belief system, but she knew the concepts.

Ghostly stories were a natural fit for her as she explored fiction. People have been telling scary stories around the campfire since the dawn of time. Because spirits are noncorporeal and can travel where they want, we naturally arrive at asking who is riding around inside your meat body. Is it just you? Or has someone else come along for the ride? And, eventually, assume control of your healthy, fully-functional body?

She also understood, and this underlies the story, that because a spirit isn’t part of the Christian pantheon that it’s going to be benign or friendly. There are plenty of malign beings drifting around on the astral plane. This is why you shouldn’t ask “whoever is listening” to answer when you’re experimenting with your Ouija board and planchette. You don’t know who will answer or what you’ve just invited into your home.

That’s the background for The Fourth Man. Three representatives of three classes of elite men gather, by coincidence, inside a first-class compartment on the night train north. They are a clergyman, Canon Parfitt; a barrister, Sir George Durand; and a doctor, Sir Campbell Clark. They’re all well-known to the public and know each other.

Canon Parfitt lost some of his backstory in the film adaptation. He was a trend-chasing vicar, one given to “scientific sermons.” As he listens to the discussion of the Félicie Bault case, he comes up with sermon ideas that will draw him even more admiring attention. In the film, he still knows his Bible. He quotes John 4:24 to edify his passengers.

“God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” (King James version)

The fourth man is Raoul Letardau, a French journalist working in London. He followed Sir Campbell Clark to the train station, wanting to ask more questions about the lecture Sir Clark gave about Félicie Bault, a woman believed to have multiple personalities who strangled herself. Why does he do this? Because he knew Félicie and another girl, Annette, when they were children. He knows the real story, not the story that Sir Campbell Clark thinks he knows.

Imagine a campfire in the center of the compartment and you’ve got the picture. Raoul talks and the other three men are unwillingly hooked by his story until they, too, are forced to believe there might be more to life than rational meat puppets.

It’s a wonderful, eerie setup. Yet it didn’t work. The trouble was the casting. The center of the story is the relationship between Annette, Félicie, and Raoul growing up together in the orphans’ home in Brittany. Annette is lovely, vivacious, alive, eager to enjoy every moment under the sun. Until she opens her mouth, you can see why everyone might adore her. Félicie is a dull, lumpy, sullen peasant girl. She’s not very pretty. She doesn’t make up for her plainness with cleverness, charm, or industry. But Félicie has one thing that Annette lacks and that’s strength and good health.

Félicie has something else Annette lacks and that’s the rudiments of decency.

Annette is supposed to be bewitching, enslaving Raoul and Félicie and, I suppose, the other kids in the orphanage, although we never see them. But all I saw was a selfish, bratty, spoiled mean girl. Annette was openly cruel to Félicie, going to the point of hypnotizing her to eat a tallow candle and think it’s the finest bread.

The point of the exercise? To torment Félicie, humiliate her in front of the rest of the orphans, and to show how much power she has over mind and body and yet make Félicie and Raoul still adore her. It takes a special actress to demonstrate this kind of overpowering charisma. Prue Clarke doesn’t have it.

I could sort of understand Raoul. Teenage boy, pretty girl, the brain shuts down. But Félicie hated Annette and said so. She hung around, but it was obvious she did so because the script told her to, not because Annette was an enthralling goddess.

Eventually, events reach their foreordained ghost story conclusion. Annette dies of consumption while Félicie remains alive and healthy. Except, someone moves into Félicie’s body, causing the learned men to study her dual personalities. There are four in the short story, only two in the film. Yep, Agatha wrote a multiple personality short story in 1925. But since it’s possession and not multiple personalities, Félicie rebels and seizes control of her body in the only way she can.

This should have been great! And it was flat.

Another aspect that could have been handled better was the song Annette sings several times in the episode. It was apparently written for the film. Unfortunately, she sings it in Italian or French (I don’t know which) and no translation via subtitle is provided. It seems to be roughly based on John Keats’ poem “O Blush not So!”:

O Blush not So! O blush not so!
Or I shall think you knowing;
And if you smile, the blushing while,
Then maidenheads are going.

There’s a blush for won’t, and a blush for shan’t,
And a blush for having done it;
There’s a blush for thought, and a blush for nought,
And a blush for just begun it.

There are several more verses. Schools also don’t teach you how racy John Keats could be.

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