Teresa Reviews “The Mirror Crack’d” (2010)

Fidelity to text

Four poison bottles (it’s pretty close, with most of the major changes being made to minor characters along with one added major character, replacing someone else)

Quality of movie

four poison bottles (pretty good on its own merits)

This was our second episode of the ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Marple television adaptation of Miss Marple novels and short stories. We are, obviously, watching these out of order. Not that order matters since the various filmed episodes don’t follow the order of publication of Miss Marple novels and stories. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this series (six seasons in all) and wonder how ITV got six seasons and 23 episodes when there were only twelve novels and some short stories, here’s the answer.

ITV didn’t want to kill a cash cow so they transformed other Christie novels into Miss Marple properties. The first episode we saw was Secret of Chimneys, because Bill is hard at work on the Complete, Annotated Secret of Chimneys. I call their productions films because even though they are made for TV, they really are 90-minute-long films. Anyway, ITV’s version of Chimneys was dreadful with a capital D.

Some lines of dialog of remained along with character names but otherwise, Chimneys was butchered and our hero, Antony Cade, castrated.

I will admit I did not have high hopes for The Mirror Crack’d. I was, thankfully, proved wrong. I enjoyed it. So did Bill.

One of the major, throughout-the-series changes that ITV did to Miss Marple was to set all the episodes in the 1950s, whether or not the actual source material took place during that time period. Miss Marple arrived in 1930 (The Murder at the Vicarage) and departed in 1976 (Sleeping Murder). Quite a range there, spanning the tail-end of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II and its aftermath and finishing up in the mid-seventies.

Nonetheless, it works here. I didn’t have a problem with the period wardrobe (great!), the timeless luxury of an English Country Estate (Gossington Hall), the 50s cars (what tailfins!), or how the characters behaved. It all felt correct. I’ve seen other movies where the characters are supposedly acting in a historical, but they feel like they just walked out of the Starbucks down the street, decaf skim latte in hand.

The film follows the book reasonably closely, allowing for usual condensing needed to turn several hundred pages of novel into a 90-minute movie. Since the adaptation is close to what Agatha wrote, the plot is coherent, with no major holes. The changes include setting the story in the 50’s, several minor characters disappear (including Heather Badcock’s husband but he was a nonentity so he didn’t matter anyway), and two more important changes.

There is no Vincent Hogg, gossip columnist to the stars, in the book. He’s a great addition, however, funny and malicious. He’s also, as would be expected with Hollywood types, one of Marina Gregg’s ex-husbands. His arm candy, Lola Brewster, was in the novel and here, she steals the show. She’s six feet tall, redheaded, and with a va-va-voom figure encased in red satin. Wow.

I noticed. Bill really noticed. Every time Ms. Brewster came on stage, he noticed. It was hard not to notice when the cameraman noticed, making sure his camera lingered on Ms. Brewster’s phenomenal cleavage. As would be expected with Hollywood types, Ms. Brewster was Jason Rudd’s former lover and a rival to Marina Gregg.

Such is Hollywood.

The actress playing Marina Gregg was a marvel. Because of her performance, I could really grasp why Agatha named the novel The Mirror Crack’d. It had never been clear before.

For those of you not up on your Tennyson, the title refers to this verse in his epic poem, “The Lady of Shalott.”

“Out flew the web and floated wide —
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.”

What was the point of this title? Agatha Christie always had a reason for her choices and this choice of title was important. In this case, Marina Gregg, Hollywood movie star, was suddenly and dramatically confronted with a truth she had not known and it destroyed her. I had never made the connection until I saw this film. It was interesting and got me to look up Tennyson, but I didn’t get it.

Now, I do.

The other major change was the movie within a movie that Marina Gregg was filming, Jason Rudd (hubby #5) directing. It was to be her comeback film: a biopic of Nefertiti. I don’t remember that at all from the novel. But it worked. It didn’t feel shoehorned in as Miss Marple and her friend, Dolly Bantry, go sleuthing on set.

What was truly interesting about the film was, for the first time, evaluating the character of Marina Gregg, Hollywood actress, in a way that I had not when reading the novel. I’m thinking in particular of how everyone around Marina Gregg made excuses for her behavior because she was so beautiful, so talented, so creative, and had suffered so deeply in her art and her life. A careful rereading of pertinent parts of the novel showed that although Agatha didn’t make a big deal of it, she wasn’t excusing Marina Gregg the way her retinue did.

What did Marina Gregg do? Well, she was a movie star, so you can start with that. But what was unforgivable to me, today, was her adopting three young children and then, when she became pregnant with a ‘real baby of her own’, she abandoned those children. Dumped them off like an unwanted litter of kittens in some alley. No one, other than one of the kids (grown to adulthood in the novel) disapproves of this behavior. If you’re a famous, beautiful movie star, it’s okay to adopt children and then walk away when they’re no longer useful for your self-image.

It’s always worthwhile to reread a good novel to see what changes as you, the reader, grow and change. When I first read The Mirror Crack’d all those years ago, this part didn’t bother me. It does now.

Something else I didn’t know until after I saw the film and did some basic research was discovering that Agatha had based the central, inciting incident on a real-world example. Gene Tierney, luminously beautiful movie star was pregnant in 1943. She volunteered at the Hollywood Canteen and a fan, ill with rubella, broke quarantine to see her. As a result, Ms. Tierney gave birth to a severely handicapped daughter who was institutionalized for most of her life. About two years later, according to Ms. Tierney’s autobiography, she met the fan again at a garden party and the fan admitted sneaking out of quarantine to meet her.

For those of you who don’t know, rubella is included in the standard MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine given to every little kid soon after birth. The vast majority of people who develop rubella get a rash for a few days and make a full recovery. If you’re in your first trimester of pregnancy, your baby is doomed to congenital rubella syndrome. You’ll either miscarry or the baby will be born with a variety of major handicaps. It’s heartbreaking and that’s why we get a vaccine against a minor disease.

It’s not minor if your baby suffers.

The Mirror Crack’d was a very good adaptation of the novel and we both recommend it. It worked on its own as a murder mystery, while remaining true to the source material, both in form and in spirit.

I can say I’m now looking forward to seeing more of ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Marple episodes based on this film. I have no idea if future episodes will be any good. At this point, having watched two episodes, ITV has a fifty percent failure rate.

So we’ll see!

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