Teresa Reviews “The Pale Horse” (2010)

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Fidelity to text: 3 blunt objects.
The original story is here: murder for hire, misdirection, witches, and cleverly disguised thallium. The major change is replacing Ariadne Oliver with Miss Marple and giving her most of the sleuthing (as opposed to Mark Easterbrook who did the job in the novel). Add a few new characters to replace deleted characters, relocate to the early 1950s, a few other minor changes, and you’re on your way to the witch’s bonfire.

Quality of movie on its own: 4 and 1/2 blunt objects.
To my surprise, I really enjoyed this ITV outing. They are terribly inconsistent, but everything worked: the pace was good, the Pale Horse was English Country Inn porn on steroids, and the actors were all having a very good time. The plot held together, despite a wee bit too much exposition at the end and not enough sleuthing to set up Miss Marple’s deduction in the earlier acts.

I’m using blunt objects for the ratings because the first onscreen murder is with a club, even though the rest were not.

Miss Marple is forced into action by that oldest of tropes: a letter arrives begging for help from a dear friend (Father Gorman) who is then revealed to have been fatally coshed in a mugging gone wrong. We, at home, know immediately that it was murder because no one gets coincidentally mugged right after mailing incriminating evidence to a super-sleuth. Miss Marple recognizes these facts but the police, who depend upon evidence and not which genre they’re in, take longer.

Father Gorman was killed after visiting a dying woman in her lodging house, so Miss Marple visits the landlady. She asks the right questions and, since inquisitive old ladies are perfectly harmless, is even permitted to examine the dead woman’s personal effects. The police haven’t been there so Miss Marple interferes with a criminal investigation — however badly run — and removes crucial evidence for her own sleuthing. Thus, she ends up at the Pale Horse hotel in Much Deeping just in time for the annual witch burning.

How can a movie fail when it’s got a witch burning? Add in modern-day witches hovering about in a very unique hotel in the middle of nowhere and you’ve got something exciting.

Father Gorman’s death is revealed to be part of a larger string of deaths. Interestingly, while each of the other deaths results in heirs getting rich much sooner than they’d hoped, all those deaths were due to … unusual illnesses. Even Father Gorman’s deathbed vigil (prior to his being coshed) was for an unusual illness. Those deaths looked suspicious to non-inheritors, but without a bloody blunt object laying around, a sad illness is not murder.

Except when it is. The right kind of poison, as Miss Marple knows, doesn’t look suspicious.

She starts sleuthing in the hotel full of suspicious guests and very soon, one of them dies under suspicious circumstances. While napping supposedly; but as Inspector Lejeune tells Miss Marple, Captain Cottam wasn’t napping alone. This was one part of the story I wanted more of. Captain Cottam, his wife, Kanga, and their widowed housekeeper, Lydia Harsnet, are staying at the Pale Horse because their house burned down under suspicious circumstances.

The implication (normal enough) is that Captain Cottam is having an affair with his hot blonde housekeeper, his hot blonde wife not being enough to keep him satiated. But there’s more! Captain Cottam needs an aphrodisiac to get it up with his hot blonde housekeeper, an aphrodisiac supplied by one of the Pale Horse’s witches. Then, after said aphrodisiac turns out to be poisoned (not with thallium), we get a scene where the hot blonde wife implies she was okay with the affair!

How could the scriptwriter give me a setup like this and then not follow through with soapy answers? It left so many questions, completely unrelated to Miss Marple’s sleuthing or murder for hire.

Anyway. Back to murder for hire. The witches were an interesting bunch. By the end of the film, you know who believes, who loses her faith, and who’s playacting for the money. Thyrza owns the Pale Horse. She’s suitably witchy in an upper-class crazy aunt way and runs the coven.

Sybil is young and ravishing, in an early 1950s goth manner. She believes. When she sweeps onstage to perform witchery for Mark Easterbrook — swathed in a full-length black cloak — we were hoping she’d be skyclad.

And she was. Sybil dramatically shed her cloak to reveal her gorgeous embroidered azure dress the color of a summer sky.

Witch number three was the most interesting. This was Bella, the Pale Horse housekeeper and char. She was a sturdy peasant hedge witch, the sort of woman the villagers visit discreetly for love potions, abortifacients, minor curses, and cures for sick sheep. She knows her herbs, our Bella, and she raises chickens for more than just eggs and soup.

Of the three, Bella was the only one who had real abilities in the occult. But because she was working class, did the dirty work and didn’t look hot and sexy, the scriptwriter relegated her to the background. Bella, I think, will quietly disappear from the police radar and go back to being the local and anonymous village hedge witch. If you need to know who she is, you will. If you don’t, you will never find out.

The other character to look out for was Mr. Bradley, the disbarred lawyer. What a great criminal. He knows the law well enough that you can’t slide a razorblade between him and illegality, yet he remains safely within the law. Watch him explain how to place a bet on some rich relative’s early demise and how that bet is perfectly legal. He knows what he’s doing, he feels fully justified, and he knows he won’t be prosecuted. Other people are taking those risks.

Mr. Venables was fun too. He’s a crochety old man in a wheelchair with no explanation for where his money comes from. Everything about him screams suspicious, but is he really? He denies being involved in burning down the Cottam’s house. I know! Perhaps Mr. Venables was the reason why Kanga Cottam didn’t mind her husband’s affair with their housekeeper. Kanga was having her own affair with Mr. Venables and if Lydia the housekeeper kept her husband busy, she had time for bedsports of her own.

Now that would have been a terrific and unexpected addition to the Pale Horse’s storyline. Instead, we get the usual sweet meeting of young lovers, in this case Mark Easterbrook and Ginger Corrigan. As soon as you see them together onscreen, you know how it will end and it does. The added fillip is having Mark pretend to arrange Ginger’s murder but again, that’s par for the course. He has to be clever, she has to be brave, and they have to help Miss Marple solve the crime.

Kanga Cottam having an affair with a crotchety, scarred man in a wheelchair while her husband’s having his own affair would be new and different and a blow for disabled rights everywhere. But alas, it was not to be.

In any case, I really enjoyed The Pale Horse and you will too. It’s got everything, including a room designed for witchcraft with the best custom-made rug I’ve ever seen. Don’t miss it and feel free to speculate on what happens next for Kanga and Mr. Venables. She’s a merry widow and he’s single so …

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