Teresa Reviews “A Murder Is Announced” (1985)

Fidelity to text: 4 and 3/4 guns.

The scriptwriters changed a few names, most notably that of the vicar’s cat. In the novel, the cat’s name is Tiglath Pileser. In the film, he becomes a she and is renamed Delilah, permitting the vicar to make a sex joke. For those not up on your ancient history, Tiglath Pileser was the name of a series of Assyrian kings (I, II, and III) who ruled more than three thousand years ago. While Tiglath Pileser is a very good name for a well-educated vicar’s cat, so is Delilah. Also, the refugee cook’s name changes from Mitzi to Hannah although that’s one of those changes that didn’t need to happen. Tiglath Pileser would confuse the overwhelming majority of modern viewers and Delilah would not. But Mitzi to Hannah? There was no reason other than the scriptwriter must not have wanted anyone to think of Mitzi Gaynor and who’s going to these days? Otherwise, the film follows the novel to the letter. Even the time period remains much the same as the novel was published in 1950 and the adaptation is about 1951 or so.

Quality of film on its own: 4 and 3/4 guns.

That missing last quarter gun is due (again) to the lack of subtitles. However, as we watch more Joan Hickson films, we’re getting better at understanding the dialog, even that of quaint, rustic villagers. This film worked beautifully. The producers took their time, letting the story to unfold as it needed to; no frenetic jump cuts or annoyingly truncated storylines where you say “what just happened?”

This adaptation was wonderful. I will admit the story took its time, but it’s darned hard to compress a complex story into 90 minutes. This version took a full 159 minutes and used every single one of those minutes well. Most movies are the equivalent of a short story; a novel has so much happening that if you try to squeeze it down to 90 minutes or even 120 minutes (two hours), you lose chunks of the plot. There’s no room to explore characters. The camera doesn’t have time to linger.

In this case, we got time. But it wasn’t wasted as I’ve already observed in other Agatha adaptations where I’m left wondering why the camera is focused on a bird in a tree or a lingering panoramic view of a lake and wishing they’d just get on with the story, dammit. This is the same adaptation the scriptwriter gave short-shrift to so that it’s obviously missing chunks of plot. There was time.

In this version, there are scenes of the police inspector driving from one place to another but my word, those one-lane wide English back-country roads between fields and pastures were oddly compelling. They were one step above gravel. It really gave me a sensation of how isolated Chipping Cleghorn was. I believe this conscious choice was made not to pad out the film but to make the viewer wonder why Letitia Blacklock, an obviously well-educated, well-traveled lady of means, chose to bury herself in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere.

This is a village where she knows no one and no one knows her. This begs the question: she has no relatives? Anywhere? No hometown where she grew up? Miss Blacklock had lived in London, yet she voluntarily chooses the back of beyond.

Miss Marple comments on this situation. In decades past, before the disruptions of two world wars sandwiching the worldwide depression, everyone in a village knew each other going back for generations. The locals knew each other’s grandmothers’ scandals. Someone who moved in from the outside would have to be vetted by a respected resident but they would always remain an outsider. Grandchildren might — might! — become insiders instead of being the grandchildren of the Blacklocks who moved in fifty years ago.

But change comes to us all, including backward little villages and thus, we have households full of people who have to accept on faith what they are told. So do their new neighbors. This is who I am. Believe everything I say. Miss Marple, being the astute judge of human nature that she is, recognizes the golden opportunity to lie about one’s background.

As always, she is proved correct: she never trusts what anyone says because her lack of faith in humanity is so often justified by events. Look at the facts and deduce from them. Listen to what everyone says but don’t believe them. Work out how a pile of statements from different suspects line up with each other and, more importantly, where they differ. The truth lies somewhere in that tangle.

Each of our possible suspects notices the same thing — the central heating is on. They also can’t quite believe what they are seeing and hearing and being told, but, because no one knows each other well, they have to accept what they are told.

A Murder Is Announced has more than one liar.

There was one change the scriptwriters could have made to the text that I would have appreciated. We never find out what Colonel Easterbrook’s wife is up to. She’s much younger than her elderly husband. In a village packed with dowdy, real-looking people (the casting directors should have gotten an award because they were spot-on for every single character on screen), Mrs. Easterbrook is glamorous. Old Colonels don’t get to marry hot blonde vixens unless they’ve got something ($$ is the usual object) that the hot blonde vixen wants enough to go to bed with a doddering geezer. Agatha doesn’t tell us what Mrs. Easterbrook is hiding either. I would like to know.

But that’s a minor quibble.

I can’t recommend this particular adaptation enough. It played fair with the text, it didn’t skip any of the clues, the actors and actresses were uniformly terrific and I could tell them apart. They looked like real people, unusual in this day and age when Hollywood routinely casts actors who have been surgically modified into Barbie and Ken lookalikes.

You should read the book and watch this version. They complement each other beautifully.

Aha!

I might have worked out the real reason for changing the cat’s name from Tiglath Pileser to Delilah. The scriptwriter didn’t want the audience thinking of any of the cats from T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. If you know your Broadway shows, Eliot’s little book of poems became the worldwide phenomenon called Cats in 1980. Those cats had exotic, complex, made-up names like Munkustrap, Jennyanydots, and Rum Tum Tugger. Tiglath Pileser would have fit right in with that bunch. When A Murder Is Announced was aired in February of 1985, the audience might have thought of those singing, dancing cats instead of the vicar’s cat that gave Miss Marple her vital, crime-solving clue.

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