Teresa Reviews “The Red Signal” (1982)

Teresa reviews “The Red Signal” (1982) and wonders if the medium could have foretold the disappointing ending.

Fidelity to text: 4 guns

It’s virtually word for word remake of the short story, other than a few expanded scenes and that “improved” ending, which was terrible.

Quality of movie on its own: 2 guns

Like the dry ice imitating London fog, it felt off and fake. It wasn’t eerie enough.

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

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

The Red Signal demonstrates how people’s poor communication skills lead to huge problems. Conversely, if any of the characters had been able to voice simple coherent sentences or ask for clarification, we wouldn’t have had a plot. You’d think everyone got their exercise exclusively from jumping to conclusions.

One reason for Dermot, Claire, and Sir Alington’s total inability to form complete sentences might be the intense shame surrounding mental illness at the time. Mental illness carried a far bigger stigma then than it does now. It was shameful in every way, tainting the entire family as not just batty or dangerous, but socially unacceptable.

Patient confidentiality also clouds the issue. Sir Alington is scrupulous about not revealing what he knows about the Trent household. He also assumes that dear nephew Dermot understands who he is hinting about. Despite being a noted shrink, Sir Alington completely misunderstands what Dermot knows.

You don’t expect better from Dermot, an ordinary young man of the period, but alienists are supposed to be better at reading people. You’d be wrong, leading you to suspect that Sir Alington isn’t as good an alienist as he thinks he is. After all, he’s diagnosing Jack Trent over a dinner party that’s followed by a séance! Psychologists of today expect to do a little more work than that to make a diagnosis, especially one that will lead to someone being locked up in an insane asylum.

There’s also the issue of divorce. If Jack Trent is crazy and locked up in the loony bin, then Claire is stuck. She can’t divorce him, not without an act of parliament or some such extreme, very public action. She has to wait for him to die. Insanity as grounds for divorce didn’t become legal until the late 1930s. Divorce at the time of the episode (mid-1920s based on clothing and cars) was granted for adultery and abandonment. So people got divorced, but they went into court knowing that at least one party was going to get dragged through the mud with private detectives discussing hotel room trysts involving third parties (the co-respondent). Divorce was never as casual as fiction would have you believe.

Divorcing your homicidal spouse was even harder as they were unlikely to cooperate with providing photographic proof of adultery. That’s how Agatha and Archie endured this farce to get their divorce.

But that doesn’t matter much in this story, because even with all that going on in the background, none of these educated, upper-class ladies and gentlemen were capable of clarity of speech and thought. I can’t stand it when characters are willfully stupid because the plot depends on them not understanding or asking simple questions.

The warning red signal that Dermot receives for mysterious reasons wasn’t handled well. No reason was given for why he gets the signal, other than (as in the short story) he just does. No rescue of a Bedouin shaman, no talisman picked up as a souvenir in the Great War, no history of the second sight in his family. No, he just does.

Worse, what the camera shows is a red and white drawing. When you think of all the tricks a good cameraman can do, it’s pathetic. Why didn’t a red haze descend over the camera, showing everything edged in fire? That would have been dramatic and then Dermot could have doubted his own sanity, making for a much more interesting film. Instead, the red signal is dull.

Claire, Jack’s wife and Dermot’s obsession, is even duller than the red signal. She’s pretty enough but that’s all . The actress didn’t make me understand why Jack was ready to kill her and anyone who wanted her (the old trope of if I can’t have you, no one can) nor why she fascinated Dermot. She was a hole in the screen.

If Carol Drinkwater had played Claire, it might be understandable. Instead, she portrayed auburn-haired Violet Eversleigh, live wire and life of the party. Most men and some women would be obsessed with her. Of course, Violet Eversleigh wouldn’t have been as mealymouthed as Claire and that would have changed the plot completely. Our Violet has a husband somewhere offstage, probably at home working on his stamp collection while his wife works on her career as a co-respondent in divorce cases.

The ending was dreadful. Agatha’s, I’m sorry to say, wasn’t much better, but at least it was clear. Jack — who is a crack shot — shoots himself rather than get hauled off to jail for the murder of Sir Alington. There’s still the question of who called Inspector Verrall and Constable Cawley. The reader must assume it was Claire, finally womaning up and demonstrating why she’s such an object of fascination, but it’s not spelled out.

I ranted to Bill during our nightly walk afterwards and worked out how the ending could have been so much better, redeeming the film.

When Dermot was on the run from the coppers, he could have hidden somewhere and overheard a conversation between strangers (a classic Agatha trope!) that suggested that he might have misinterpreted what Sir Alington said. That is, he’d hear one barfly say to the other, “I meant him, you dummy, not her.”

“Well then, why didn’t you say so?”

That would set up Dermot for his realization that he had no idea what was actually going on. The fog of confusion would begin to lift.

At the same time, there should have been an explanation for why Inspector Verrall and Constable Cawley, supposedly searching for Dermot, ended up in the Trent house. What should have happened was that Claire overheard Jack gloating over shooting Sir Alington and framing Dermot for the murder. Then, worse, (finally forcing spineless Claire to actually act instead of lounge around like a wan, pale, fainting flower) she’d hear him decide that tonight was the night to unite the knife with Claire.

Or she could already suspect Jack, because her maid told her about Sir Alington’s murder. Or something like that. Anything! At that point, she summons Scotland Yard.

Thus, when Dermot finally realizes what a fool he’d been as Jack reveals his true nature, it wouldn’t be a complete and utter surprise when Inspector Verrall, Constable Cawley, and Claire burst into the room. How did the Inspector know? Because Claire told him.

But there’s not a hint of this onscreen. The Inspector and the Constable appear out of the fog because the plot demands they do so.

The reason to watch this mess, other than completeness’s sake, is the séance scene. That was well done. Nothing else was.

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