Teresa Reviews “The Great Actress Murder Case”

Teresa reviews “The Great Actress Murder Case” (2018) and thought it was a faithful rendition of “The Mirror Crack’d” but damn if Marina Gregg didn’t get away with it again!

(Daijoyuu Satsujin Jiken; Japanese version of The Mirror Crack’d)

Fidelity to text: 3 poisoned cocktails

A Miss Marple mystery becomes a Japanese police procedural! Yet everything important remains.

Quality of movie on its own: 4 poisoned cocktails

The police procedural format works surprisingly well and Margot Bence finally gets some screentime.

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

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

As with all the foreign adaptations, I’ll stick with the novel’s names to make it easier for me and for you, dear reader.

This adaptation makes two radical changes to the novel. Miss Marple vanishes entirely. There are no amateur sleuths, old lady division or any other kind, running around contemporary Tokyo. It’s policemen all the way, at every level. That turns the novel into a police procedural, a format Agatha never wrote in.

And it worked. The only other police procedural Agatha we’ve seen (to date) was Sparkling Cyanide (2003) which also added a near-retirement-age Tommy and Tuppence-like set of spy/investigators. It’s amazing how a good script can transmogrify her novels into something she’d have never written and yet still remain true to the plot. It’s old wine in shiny new, space-age bottles.

The policeman in charge is Ryuya Shokokuji. He’s the head of the First Criminal Investigation Division, Tokyo. Like Poirot and Miss Marple, he thinks very hard about what actually happened as opposed to what he’s being told. He shares several characteristics with Sherlock Holmes. He’s obsessive, detail-oriented, laser-focused, and interested in the truth rather than kowtowing to famous celebrities.

I’m using Shokokuji’s name because he doesn’t exist in Agatha’s pantheon. I’m also following the Western custom of given name followed by family name.

His two assistants don’t have parallels in Christie World either. The young lady is Fueko Misaki. She’s clearly devoted to Shokokuji but he doesn’t notice her as a woman, at least not until she demonstrates her parkour skills to show how someone could climb to the third-floor balcony to leave a threatening letter for Marina Gregg. Watch Shokokuji’s face as he watches her climb.

But this being Japanese television instead of Hollywood, they remain professionals instead of instantly falling into bed and declaring their passionate love for each other.

Shokokuji’s other sidekick is Banpei Tatara, a newly assigned bumpkin from the provinces. Like Hastings and Watson, he’s eager to help and his suggestions are always wrong.

Once you get over the shock of seeing Japanese policemen instead of Miss Marple, the plot hews pretty closely to the novel. It opens with a scene in a costume drama starring Marina. It’s her comeback film after years spent in seclusion, and it’s directed by her newest husband, Jason Rudd. Afterwards, they’re hosting a gala party at their new mansion, bought from Heather Badcock and her husband.

Be prepared, by the way, for a weird and creepy added backstory revealed late in the film about Heather and her husband. No, he wasn’t Marina’s hubby long, long ago for a very brief time (right out of the novel). It’s that after his wife died he married, according to the wishes of his wife’s family, his stepdaughter, Heather, when she came of age. And she, dutiful daughter, was okay with it.

Bill and I gawked at each other over that one.

Anyway, back to the party. Heather fangirls all over Marina and soon afterwards, dies suddenly and shockingly after drinking Marina’s cocktail. The police swoop in, using marvelous CSI-style forensic techniques to analyze the fatal cocktail on the spot that would make any police department in the world jealous.

The investigation proceeds largely from Shokokuji’s viewpoint. As it unfolds with interviews and detecting, each day is date-stamped and there’s a location. Gradually, Shokokuji discovers that Marina received threatening letters and she’s had arsenic added to her tea.

As Shokokuji uncovers the lies behind Marina’s façade, two more people are murdered: Ella, Jason’s secretary, and Guiseppe, the butler. She has enemies, notably Lola Brewster. She also had adopted three children. When she became pregnant with her own “real” baby, she got rid of those kids.

This is my fourth adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d. It’s the first one to give Margot Bence and her siblings any screen time. Finally, we see how they felt about being loved and wanted and then tossed aside as understudies in the dress rehearsal for the main performance. Shokokuji also uncovers the son of Marina’s second hubby. His family was torn apart when dad abandoned mom and married Marina. Despite her stated wish for children, she wouldn’t accept a stepchild. They had no relationship. It didn’t look like Marina even recognized him. Why would she? He’s an extra in the crowd and unworthy of notice.

Nor, true to form, did Marina recognize her daughter, Margot, or her brother when they were at the party or on the set. There’s a scene late in the film where you see Marina sobbing as she watches her children being taken away from her in a taxi. Don’t be fooled by those crocodile tears. She made the arrangements herself. She’s reveling in the emotion and not giving a damn about how those kids feel. They don’t matter.

But then she miscarries. Her life falls apart, and she goes into seclusion. She does not reclaim her abandoned children, although she could have. Remember, they were props for her dress rehearsal as a mother.

Unfortunately, the script changed Margot and her brother. In the novel, Margot resented what Marina did to her and her sibs. She was angry that Marina didn’t recognize them. But in the film, Margot and Matsumushi (her brother) give Marina a pass.

She’s a famous movie star! She can’t be judged by the standards that normal people are held to. Aargh. Four versions of The Mirror Crack’d and not one hack scriptwriter or director can be bothered to read Agatha’s own words about how Margot felt and what Marina’s abandonment did to her and her sibs. Not one.

At least we got to see some of it and reach the true conclusion that no one onscreen is willing to say: Marina Gregg is one selfish, self-centered, narcissistic bitch.

In fact, a new twist demonstrates the depths of Marina’s narcissism. Why did she buy Heather’s mansion? Because Heather had blogged about having a fever the day she met Marina at a recital around the time she miscarried. Marina had obsessively surfed the web, looking for mentions of her. What you see is not a spur-of–the-moment murder fueled by rage. It’s premeditated. Marina already suspected Heather of infecting her and her unborn baby. She needed to be sure but as soon as she was, she poisoned Heather for being foolish.

As for Shokokuji, he diligently follows every lead and he reaches a logical conclusion. It’s right out of Sleeping Murder as per Miss Marple herself: the culprit must be someone who was on the spot for each incident. The poisoned cocktail, the arsenic in the tea, the placement of the threatening letters, the butler’s stabbing, the access to Ella’s inhaler.

Only one person fits that description and once Shokokuji works out that the threatening letters were assembled from a single page in one newspaper where the date doesn’t match what he’s been told, he knows. It’s Marina, who’s far too special to adhere to normal human standards of behavior. Even in death, she is shielded from the consequences of her actions.