Teresa Reviews “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” (2015), French version

Teresa reviews “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” (2015), the French episode Pourquoi pas Martin? from Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Source: Amazon DVD set

Fidelity to text: 3½ cliff shoves

Laurence and Avril divvy up Bobby and Frankie’s roles, but otherwise, the plot remains intact.

Quality of movie: 3½ cliff shoves

It shines when our cast is offscreen and flounders when Avril demonstrates her ineptness and Laurence his toxic management skills.

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This episode was considerably better than I’d hoped for, despite the presence of our stars. It’s hard to believe that any newspaper would be desperate enough to give Avril a job when she’s so squeamish about the messiness of real life (journalists who are squicked-out quickly get fired), generally incompetent at everything she does, and resentful about doing her job. Even so, it was unpleasant to watch Commissaire Laurence bully her and discount her beauty and skills at every opportunity.

You’d think Les Petits Meurtres was setting up an arc of enemies-to-lovers with a strong flavor of bully romance. Yes, those are real possibilities in Romancelandia, but not here. Laurence is too toxic even for a bully romance alpha male.

So. The plot. Avril is out enjoying taking pictures on the scenic cliffs overlooking the North Sea. It’s summer, based on the amazing array of wildflowers. She’s ambling around when she hears a scream and discovers to her horror a man who fell over the cliff onto the rocks below. He’s dying. She’s so squeamish (but she wants to be a reporter!) that she can’t even help him, other than listen to his cryptic remark “Why not Martin?” He dies while she panics. She can’t bear to touch him, so she fishes out his handkerchief to cover his eyes. The handkerchief was a nice touch because it let her find the photograph of the beautiful woman in the dying man’s pocket.

Back at the top of the cliff, she meets a stranger who agrees to watch the body while she flees for help. He’s so helpful and she, having no nose for news and no Nancy Drew instincts, doesn’t instantly wonder if there’s a connection between the body at the bottom of the cliffs and the sudden appearance of a stranger in this incredibly isolated, empty of all human life spot.

Avril does one thing right. She reports the body at once to Laurence. Who scoffs because it’s Avril. But he checks and to his utter amazement, she’s not wrong. He doesn’t find the photograph and assumes Avril is screwing up as always.

Genuine police work occurs and the dead man’s portrait is disseminated in the newspapers. A brassy woman of exactly the sort that Laurence dislikes identifies the dead man as her brother. She meets Avril at the newspaper office and learns that Avril found a photograph and heard “Why not Martin?”

A day later, Avril’s back out enjoying nature and her amateur picnic lunch. She spies on Laurence’s professional seduction picnic lunch and when she gets back, she drinks her water. She wakes up in the hospital, poisoned by morphine.

At this point, Laurence, aided by pointed remarks from Marlène, combines the body, the missing photograph, and Avril’s involuntary overdose into a new theory. When someone’s lying at the bottom of the cliff there are three options: jumped, fell, or pushed. Pushed has leaped to the top of the list. The investigation leads to the brassy woman who lied about having a brother and has a suspicious past as a drug trafficker. Avril discovers her body in the abandoned farmhouse and once again does her terrified and squeamish damsel routine, despite this being at least the fifth body she’s seen — in various states of decay — since the start of the series.

There’s only one lead left and it’s Roland Delavallée (Roger Bassington-ffrench) who was conveniently at the top of the cliff when Avril discovered the body. Could he be a person of interest? There’s only one way to find out, since Roland’s not being particularly helpful to the police and their inquiries.

Naturally, Avril — with Laurence’s help — goes undercover at the Delavallée household by staging a car crash at the front gate to their château. Laurence’s explanation is flimsy, but Suzanne Delavallée (Sylvia Bassington-ffrench) buys it and takes Avril into her home. Once there, she’s completely charmed by Roland (who doesn’t recognize her from the cliff) and put off by his admittedly unpleasant brother, André (Henry Bassington-ffrench). André and Suzanne have a son, Frédéric (Thomas Bassington-ffrench).

The script beefed up Frédéric’s struggles. He’s a nice kid and André’s heir. In the novel, Thomas is described as being clumsy. He’s had several near-misses but Agatha doesn’t go into detail until the climax when Roger reveals his foolproof plan to murder his nephew. Here, you see Frédéric having accidents. He claims a gremlin pushed him off the swing or down the stairs or, eventually, tried to drown him in the bathtub.

Avril, having never read a single mystery, does not grasp that when the heir is singularly accident-prone, the person of interest is the next man in line to inherit. That would be Roland, André’s brother. Roland is so charming to her, you see, so she couldn’t possibly suspect him.

At the same time, creepy Dr. Sarrazin (Dr. Nicholson) and his wife, Alma (Moira Nicolson) show up. Dr. Sarrazin runs a very creepy mental institution next door to the Delavallée household. He must be the villain!

Laurence doesn’t disagree with Avril. His belief that the doctor did it is intensified by the doctor’s wife’s tale of fear, persecution, and woe. Plus, the beautiful Alma is the woman in the torn-up photograph Laurence discovered in pieces and scattered at the bottom of the cliff when he did what he should have done all along, which was to search for evidence.

Sadly, despite the presence of the creepy insane asylum next door, no scenes took place there. No crazed loons. No goonish orderlies. No disreputable, out-of-date psychiatric treatments for Avril to be rescued from. Instead, it’s all very respectable despite the screams you hear. Don’t give me screams in the background and not show me why someone’s wailing as though they’re being waterboarded.

Laurence reveals to one and all (more offstage police investigations having taken place based on what he says) that Roland was behind it all. Roland shoved Alain Langevin (Alex Pritchard) over the cliff. Roland turned his brother into a morphine addict and kept him well-supplied. Roland repeatedly and sneakily injured his nephew, Frédéric, so if the boy eventually died from a fall from a tree, everyone would assume the boy’s guardian angel finally quit in disgust.

But did Roland have a partner? Avril is disgusted to see that Laurence — at his womanizing best — has asked Alma over to his bachelor flat for champagne and to question this possible suspect. More French policework, I guess.

She spies on them (circling back to her spying on Laurence with a different woman at that picnic) and sees Alma drugging Laurence’s champagne.

At this point, Laurence reveals he knew it was Alma all along and the meeting was a trap. Whether the evidence he gathered at his bachelor pad would be admissible in court is another question.

The film was surprisingly faithful to the text. Where it shone was bringing out Roland’s sociopathic nature, something I hadn’t seen before. He wanted to hurt his nephew, turn his brother into a drug addict, and steal what wasn’t rightfully his. His charm was a thin skin over a complete lack of humanity. He’s scary and deserves meeting the guillotine.

If you like Teresa reviews “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” (2015), why not check out the Peschel Press line of annotated Agatha Christie novels?