Teresa Reviews “The Sunningdale Mystery” (1983)

Teresa reviews “The Sunningdale Mystery” (1983) and finds, despite some upgrades, still the same old model.

Fidelity to text: 2 1/2 hatpins

The short story consists solely of a conversation in a teashop overheard by Inspector Marriot. Since that makes boring TV, expect added characters, scenes, motor cars, and horses.

Quality of movie on its own: 3 hatpins

Adding characters, new settings, fabulous clothes, motor cars, horses, and disgruntled staff helped but not enough.

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

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

When Agatha wrote the short stories for Partners in Crime, each one was a parody of a famous mystery novelist of the time. One century later, give or take, the vast majority of us have no idea who any of those authors were and their once name-checked detectives are even more obscure. Among others, she parodied G.K. Chesterton (whom you should have heard of but not necessarily for mysteries), Conan Doyle (whom you’ve heard of), and herself (whom you’ve definitely heard of or you wouldn’t be watching the movie adaptations and reading my reviews). After that, it gets murky.

The Sunningdale Mystery is a case in point.

You might have heard of the author Agatha was toying with but not because of her mysteries. It’s Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci; Baroness Orczy to you and me and Emmuska to her family and friends. She’s a blueblood aristocrat who emigrated with her parents to England in 1880 at age 14 to escape peasant revolts in Austria-Hungary. She married an artist and they lived a poor but happy life.

Then, Baroness Emma got the idea from her landlady’s daughter to write stories and earn some much-needed cash. She succeeded. Her most successful character was the Scarlet Pimpernel, the basis for every fop by day, superhero by night character you’ve ever heard of. Zorro, The Shadow, Batman, Superman; if someone’s got a dual identity you can thank the Baroness.

A Crime-Solving Pimpernel

However, the Scarlet Pimpernel — despite being the paragon of derring-do when he’s not pretending to be a waste of space — did not solve crimes. For that, the Baroness invented the Old Man in the Corner. She wrote a number of short stories about him and the lady journalist Polly Burton he chats up in the teashop. The Old Man became the basis of every armchair detective you’ve ever heard of (Look! Nero Wolfe!) who solves crimes by applying his powerful intellect to the story he’s told. The Old Man doesn’t leave his chair nor does he care about informing the police, collecting admissible evidence, having criminals arrested, or seeing justice done. He most definitely does not run about the countryside looking for clues.

Crime, for him, is a puzzle to be solved. He’s got some tics. He sits in the corner (keeping his back against the wall), drinks milk, and eats cheesecake. That’s why in the restaurant Tuppence sends back Tommy’s order of steak, potatoes, peas, etc. The Old Man also habitually knots and unknots a string (think of a mouse-sized hangman’s noose) as he listens to the story and then solves it. Tommy forgot to play with his string but he got the rest of the details correct, including having a charming lady hanging on his every word.

In Agatha’s parody, Tommy and Tuppence — using lurid newspaper clippings — puzzle out a solution but who should they tell? They have no proof, just speculation. Lucky for them, Inspector Marriot is sitting at the next table listening in. Scotland Yard already has a suspect, it’s not Doris Evans, and now they’ve got a plausible scenario to hang their investigation on.

Opening Up the Story

That’s not much to work with for a TV episode. It had to be enhanced with added characters, settings other than teashops, searching for clues, and many flashbacks showing what happened instead of Tommy reading the newspaper story to Tuppence and the teashop waitress.

Thus, we open with Albert pointedly showing his feckless employer where the scissors are located.

Albert sets the tone for the rest of the servant class in the episode. The teashop waitress disdains them, even more so when Tuppence countermands Tommy’s order. The hotel manager is openly disbelieving about their name since the duo are feckless enough to have not considered what name they’d use to register under. They could be indulging in an illicit tryst but the hotel manager has bills to pay so he checks them in anyway. When Tommy needs his golf clubs, the hotel porter pointedly shows his open, empty hand first.

Tuppence shows off her astonishing wardrobe. One wonders how she pays for it since Blunt’s Brilliant Detectives doesn’t have many cases and so earns very little. Don’t miss her apricot negligee. Tommy perks right up. In fact, they enjoy several scenes bordering on salacious but still in the best of taste.

When not being abused by their inferiors, they drive through the countryside, ride down country lanes, and examine the golf course that Tommy fortuitously played in his youth.

In the meantime, poor Doris Evans waits in jail. She’s young, pretty, a typist so she’s poor, and she’s accused of murder. True to The Old Man in the Corner format, Tommy and Tuppence never go near her. All her scenes are told in flashback. She’s got good reason to be afraid as her story is ridiculous. She’s shivering in that jail cell in the women’s wing at Wandsworth and wishing she’d never taken that nice older man’s offer of a walk home under his umbrella in the driving rain.

Can You Believe Your Eyes?

The mystery is clever, turning on one of Agatha’s favorite tropes: Are you seeing what is real? Or are you being deceived? Everyone knows that’s Captain Sessle on the golf course. His bright blue jacket is unmistakable. Why did his golf game deteriorate to that of a clumsy child’s? It must be because of what the tall woman in brown (again, seen from a distance) said to him.

That last bit is where the short story does a better job. Tuppence works out how a man can wear a skirt over a set of plus-fours. Since the lower legs are stocking-clad and the shoes don’t show, the silhouette reads as female. That wasn’t spelled out in the film.

The hatpin murder weapon is clever. As Agatha and Tuppence both knew, a hatpin has always been seen as a woman’s weapon. If you’ve never seen one, a lady’s hatpin is essentially a steel knitting needle with a dagger-like point. They’re six to ten inches long, with a fancy knob at one end. A lady might wear one, two, or even three to skewer her fashionably enormous hat to her towering hairdo. Edwardian ladies used them all the time. They were widely recommended as defense weapons as very few mashers cared to have one thrust into their flesh.

But as Tuppence made clear, ladies no longer wore hatpins because they’d bobbed their hair and hats the size of turkey platters turned into snug-fitting cloches. She hadn’t worn one in years. But a man, especially an older one, might not realize how much fashion had changed. Would the reader/viewer catch on? Or would they think that since only women used hatpins, the murderer had to be female.

The reason to watch is Tuppence’s fashion sense. It’s divine, even if the episode needed more flair and flash and flirting.

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