Teresa Reviews “The Body in the Library” (2004)

Fidelity to text

3 and 1/2 garrots (the murderer was radically altered although crimes and motivation still fit perfectly within Agatha’s own text). There were some other minor modifications. The other most important change is the date. The novel took place in 1942. This filmed version was set around 1950.

Quality of movie

4 garrots. Gorgeous. Despite the sudden change of murderers, the film held together almost perfectly. The reason for the almost? I couldn’t accept the murderer’s motives. Remember that the scriptwriter revamped Agatha’s choice of murderer. It worked and if you’re unfamiliar with the novel, you won’t notice. If you’re familiar with the novel, you will most definitely notice and might throw what’s left of your cheese platter at the TV set.

We’ve been watching ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Marple TV adaptations out of order. Bill and I decided to be more systematic about watching all the Agatha Christie films. This will allow us to see if the producers have any kind of overall arc in mind. Agatha didn’t but producers play fast and loose with novel adaptations all the time. So they might! We’ll see.

Thus, we’ve seen three Marple adaptations already (The Secret of Chimneys, The Mirror Crack’d, and The Blue Geranium all from season 5). So we’re going back to the beginning and already, there’s a change.

We’ve got a different Miss Marple!

The first three seasons of Marple had Geraldine McEwan in the title role. I’d gotten used to Julia McKenzie. Ms. McKenzie took over for seasons 4, 5, and 6. It must have been a shock for the audience at the time. You get used to seeing a particular actor or actress in a role. It feels right. Then, something happens and things don’t look right. I doubt if the ITV producers gave an in-series explanation for the sudden altering of Miss Marple’s appearance, voice, and mannerisms. This isn’t Doctor Who where the good doctor regenerates whenever the producer feels like shaking things up a bit.

It also felt decidedly odd to see David Walliams appear as a minor character when he’s also Tommy Beresford in the Tommy and Tuppence Partners in Crime TV series. He’s still a doofus.

But now that we’re watching Marple in order, we’ll see if the producers explain away the substitution. Something along the lines of a character telling Jane Marple “my that rest rejuvenated you.” I’ll inform all of you if Doctor Who appears on the scene.

What’s weird is even though we are being systematic, ITV wasn’t systematic at all in their selection of Miss Marple properties to adapt. Oh no. They started not with Miss Marple’s first introduction, which would have made sense and followed the canon. They could have filmed the short stories and novels in order of publication, like the Poirot TV series did. That allows for character development and the possibility of an overall story arc.

Under that sensible and understandable circumstance, Miss Marple’s first TV outing should have been The Tuesday Night Club, a short story first published in 1927. Or, they could have used Miss Marple’s first novel to start the TV series: The Murder at the Vicarage (published in 1930).

No, ITV, for baffling reasons of their own, chose to begin Marple with The Body in the Library. This was Agatha’s second Jane Marple novel, published in 1942. In between Vicarage and Body are a number of short stories so it’s not like there wasn’t plenty of material to choose from.

Then they filmed the episodes apparently at random. It doesn’t look like they used each short story. They did adapt novels that Miss Marple didn’t inhabit, probably to fill out the TV seasons since there aren’t as many Jane Marple properties as there are Hercule Poirot stories and novels. Even so, that’s strange. See my review of The Secret of Chimneys which was published long before Jane Marple was a twinkle in Agatha’s eye to see what can go wrong.

The ways of producers are mysterious.

So here we are, with the first episode. I liked Geraldine McEwan as Jane Marple very much. She’s much more like an elderly spinster than Julia McKenzie who reminded me of Jessica Fletcher at times. The adaptation is gorgeous. No expense was spared on those glorious sets, costumes, automobiles, and cast of thousands including a dance orchestra.

Because the setting was moved forward in time from 1942 to 1950 (or so), we got some backstory for the Jefferson family and why these people are hanging together when they’re not related. It made sense in the context of the movie.

There’s a strong sense of past grief hanging over this movie. Conway Jefferson lost his legs, wife, son, and daughter to German bombs. His household now consists of himself, his widowed son-in-law Mark Gaskell, and his widowed daughter-in-law, Adelaide Jefferson. Adelaide has a son, Peter, from her previous marriage to an RAF pilot, shot down in the war, leaving her a pregnant widow. She married Conway Jefferson’s son, Frank, and was widowed again.

We also get to see Miss Marple gazing wistfully at a sepia-tinged photograph of a handsome young soldier. Relative? Crush? Fiancé? Adored lover with whom she had a torrid affair? We aren’t told. Apparently, this change was enough to incite the viewing public into believing the producers had desecrated Agatha’s memory because of course it had to be a torrid affair! This demonstrates so clearly Miss Marple’s own viewpoint: she always believes the worst of people because it’s so often true.

In this case, I’d say that we moderns are completely unable to consider that it’s possible for men and women to care about each other without having hot, banging sex at all times. That young man could have been a relative, you know. There wasn’t a single family in England that didn’t lose young men to the Great War. Agatha was well-aware of that fact. Then, when she was writing The Body in the Library (1942), England was at war again, with young men dying in agony all over Europe, North Africa, and Asia. World War II must have brought back every miserable memory and loss endured during the first World War.

All I can say to people getting their knickers in a twist over Miss Marple gazing at a portrait is get over yourself. People die and their family and friends grieve, sometimes for the rest of their lives. It doesn’t mean sex was involved.

But back to The Body in the Library. People who don’t read Agatha Christie or don’t read her carefully, think she’s bloodless and bland, like the coziest of cozy mysteries. They are wrong. A strangled eighteen-year-old girl and a sixteen-year-old girl burned to death are not cozy. Those girls had their entire lives ahead of them, as Miss Marple knows very well.

The Body in the Library is steeped with passion, requited and not. There’s also social opprobrium (everyone believes Colonel Bantry was carrying on with a platinum blonde despite all evidence to the contrary). Money and the desperate need for it (Mark Gaskell and Adelaide Jefferson among many others). The burning desire to elevate one’s station in life (Josie Turner, Ruby Keene, and Raymond Starr among others). And murder, when all else fails.

So we watched and enjoyed and ate our fancy cheese platter. Dancing, music, crime solving, the fanciest, classiest hotel I have ever seen on film, even hot Latin gigolos making sure lady guests are very happy. Wow. Scene for scene, dialog for dialog, this adaptation followed the novel faithfully, considering the constraints of movies versus text.

Then the ending and the reveal of the murderer and the motive.

Ack!

What? No. Please don’t do this to me. I know what the darned plot is and yes, the scriptwriter’s invention fits. But it wasn’t right. It didn’t feel right. It felt like the scriptwriter decided to be ‘relevant’. To bring dusty, musty, fusty old-lady Agatha into the modern world. To make a ‘statement’.

I ask you. Why? The novel was fine as it was. To anyone familiar with the novel, this new ending will not come as an improvement (unlike the adaptation of The Blue Geranium, which was greatly enriched compared to the original source material).

On the other hand, if you have not read the novel, you probably won’t have a problem. Assuming you don’t understand that the movie adaptation is set in 1950 and this kind of story in 1950 is … unlikely to say the least.

Times change, people change, cultures change. People still remain people and are subject to the vagaries of life. The thing to remember is that cultures change very slowly and what’s acceptable, even commonplace today was not commonplace or acceptable or even recognized in 1950.

The Body in the Library is worth watching for so, so many reasons. An actual understanding of cultural mores in 1950 isn’t one of them. These people are modern-day Englishmen and women who time-traveled back to 1950, carrying their modern lifestyles with them. Like Doctor Who.

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