Teresa’s Review: A Murder Is Announced (2005)

A Murder is Announced Geraldine McEwan January 2005 review

Fidelity to text: 3 guns.

You’ll get both major and minor changes, the biggest being complete rewrites of three separate relationships along with discarding the Vicar, his wife, and their cat. That forced the screenwriter to come up with a different, less plausible reason for Miss Marple to arrive on the scene: like Jessica Fletcher, ITV Production demands that Miss Marple be related to just about everyone, whether it’s likely or not. For an elderly spinster, Miss Marple sure has a lot of extremely distant relatives but no close ones who are still alive.

Quality of film on its own: 3 and 1/2 guns.

I’d have given it that last 1/2 gun except the ending fell apart, due to the scriptwriter’s desire to rewrite Agatha’s own better, more plausible and dramatic choice in how to reveal the murderer. This was a poor choice, but in line with other poor choices that ITV Productions has made with Marple. They have to be unique and cutting edge and different and you can’t be any of those things by remaining true to the original source material. Sometimes this works, if the source material is scanty. Not this time! There was plenty of material to use.

I’m discovering that I never know what I’m going to get with ITV’s production of Miss Marple adaptations. We watched a few out of order and then went back to the beginning with season 1. A Murder Is Announced was the fourth and final episode of season 1.

As always, it looks gorgeous. That spa that Miss Marple stays at is astounding with stunning blue tile everywhere. There’s a castle in Scotland, and of course the charming village of Clipping Cleghorn. Agatha came up with great placenames, although she didn’t have to work at it. Great Britain has loads of offbeat and unusual names so mixing and matching must have been easy. The village of Clipping Cleghorn is where we start having problems.

It’s so clean! So manicured! Every building looks freshly pressure-washed.

That house the nice lesbian couple live in (Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd) is a palace. Their cobblestone drive must have been weeded mere moments before the filming began. I have never seen such immaculate cobblestones. There wasn’t even any moss on them and considering England’s climate, that is unusual. Their house was huge and God only knows how two women, running a farm on their own, managed to keep it up without servants. I got the distinct impression from the novel that while Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd are managing, they aren’t rich enough to live in what used to be the squire’s house. They’d be able to afford the English cottage equivalent of a doublewide. This house is not it.

Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd are the first of the major relationship changes. In the novel, their relationship is implied. Here, watching them hold hands and kiss, you know they’re sharing a bed. Since the vicar and his wife and their cat, Tiglath Pileser (but more about the cat later) were written out of the script, Miss Murgatroyd suddenly becomes Miss Marple’s distant relative. This explains why Miss Marple is invited to stay and — gasp! — possibly notice the illicit relationship between Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd.

Even in 1951 or so, I doubt Miss Marple would care. She’s seen every aspect of human nature before. Since the two ladies in question are well-behaved, discreet, take good care of their farm, and are not murderers, she won’t gossip. It’s not like she’s unfamiliar with the concept of a Boston marriage. Those go back a long way and plenty of women have lived together to save money and provide companionship. It’s only tacky moderns like us who have to ask prying questions about who is sleeping in whose bed.

Colonel Easterbrook lost his wife, Laura, along with her glamorous and possibly criminal past. Instead, we get a made-up story about his being drummed out of the army in disgrace, his drunkenness, and his being estranged from his daughter. He gets a new relationship with Mrs. Swettenham, something that did not exist in the novel. Mrs. Swettenham is revealed to be a single mother — gasp! — who’s son, Edmund, heartily disapproves of the relationship because he’s a selfish, grasping toad.

Edmund, in turn, loses his chance at happiness with Philippa since in this version, no relationship exists at all. They flirt and eventually marry in the novel. Not here. Even though Edmund and Philippa are apparently the only unattached people under the age of thirty for miles around, they don’t notice each other. He’s too busy prying into his mother’s love life to have one of his own. For her part, Philippa has too much to hide.

The love triangle of Colonel Easterbrook, Mrs. Swettenham, and Edmund is further complicated by the presence of his black Labrador Retriever (I think). The dog was written into the script to prove that Colonel Easterbrook isn’t married and has only a dog to talk to, poor soul. Then the dog disappears even though there were occasions when his dog would have been by his side. I don’t think the screenwriter had any idea of how close a lonely man can get to his dog. The dog showed up in one scene and was apparently crated in a back bedroom the rest of the time. No one would do that to their only companion. England is a nation of dog-lovers meaning Colonel Easterbrook’s neighbors would have complained vociferously about his treatment of his dog. He’d end up on charges because of dog abuse long before he becomes a suspect in a murder.

The dog also did not help Miss Marple solve the mystery, like the Vicar’s cat, Tiglath Pileser, did. The cat served a real purpose in the novel, adding that random element of serendipity. Miss Marple would have worked out the crime on her own but the cat made sure of it.

The other relationship change was to ensure the viewer and Miss Blacklock were suspicious about the openly icky relationship between Patrick and Julia, her visiting young, distant cousins. They’re brother and sister but they sure don’t act like it.

You may ask if this adaptation did anything right besides gorgeous settings and costumes. They did. Mitzi, the refugee servant was much closer to the novel, even retaining her name and gaining a nationality (Swiss). Her treatment by Patrick was similar: he harassed and teased her and she had to put up with it because she was a foreigner, refugee, and servant. He, as a scion of a good family, could be nasty to a helpless and trapped person and get away with it.

Zoë Wanamaker placed Letitia Blacklock and she was very good. All the actors and actresses were very good other than that the casting director is showing a decided taste for prettier than normal. If you watch the Joan Hickson version of A Murder Is Announced, you’ll see at once what I mean. Those actors and actresses looked like real people you would meet on the street in your hometown. These actors and actresses look like actors and actresses pretending to look like real people. Kind of the same way the village of Chipping Cleghorn is an idealized vision of a tiny village out in the middle of nowhere rather than the dirty, messy reality complete with weeds and cow manure in the streets. Even the pig sties were neat.

But I could live with all of these changes. Compressing a complex novel down to 94 minutes of screen time is difficult. If you aren’t familiar with the novel, you won’t even notice.

Until you get to the end, when it all falls apart. I could not accept how the murderer figures out that Miss Murgatroyd is a danger. Maybe subtitles would have helped, but I doubt it. It wasn’t set up properly. Then Mitzi (Catherine Tait was wasted in this role) bursts onto the scene screaming about who the murderer is! In the novel, you get Mitzi being very brave and risking death to unmask the killer. Here, you get a temper tantrum from a difficult servant.

You do get to see the Easterbrook/Swettenham triangle resolved but in the most cursory way. I suppose the participants realized, after numerous murders, that life is short and decide to bury the hatchet but not in each other’s skulls. It felt forced, as if the screenwriter needed some sort of happy ending after three people were shot, poisoned, and strangled respectively and couldn’t write anything better. Goodness knows the actors and actresses tried.

Watch this version of A Murder Is Announced for completeness’ sake, but unless you really want to see that spa again, don’t watch it a second time.