agatha on-screen
semi-watching the endless marple on TV this weekend, i began to put together a theory of what film and television get wrong about christie (in line, anyway, with what i’ve got from the admittedly slightly skewed selection i’ve read so far): it boils down to a fossilisation of the jazz age, i think (which started with a trend-setting 70s version of the great gatsby)… in the books, this element is a kind of chaotic quasi-teen energy of the now, not necessarily accurately observed in regard to detail, but enjoyed and deployed for flow and larks, and what i’ve been calling AC’s war against seriousness
on-screen today it seems to turn to a combo of frozen fogeyism (everyone is played with “that” kind of accent, except for a few yokelish country-folk*) and ultra-researched art deco decor — worst of all there’s sometimes a kind of “in-quotes” attitude towards the material AND the times which really misses the point
of course this kind of fossilisation of the pop-cult passions of times gone by is more normal than not — it’s kind of an iron law that the more exuberantly rule-busting the fad was, the more obsessively rigid and pompous its archive-retrieval — but it’s exactly this iron law i was so surprised to find christie casually and cheerfully breaking; her writing is quite un-arch and anti-nostalgic (maybe this changes in the later stuff — i haven’t got beyond 1941)
(ok i’m tired from work and preoccupied with various admin things so i’m not analysing very cogently, maybe; and i haven’t been taking notes**: i just want to get something down while i had it in mind)
*haha including JACK DAVENPORT in one particularly dim bit of casting
**a note i did take: dear god harry enfield is a terrible actor when he does “non-comedy” roles
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in Do You See /FT • TV • 604 views
i actually quite like geraldine mcewan as jane marple, but i haven’t read any of the marple books so i’m obviously agnostic as to how well this reading gets at christie
Dear god harry enfield is a terrible actor when he does comedy roles too.
WHilst I think you have a point, the budgets of the TV versions play into this fossilisation, lack of exteriors and “club” scenes make the exuberent into drawing room mysteries. Certainly there was a liveliness to the Rutherford Marple’s which always felt non-canonical, but perhaps were more true to the spirit of early Christie.
Julie Christie for Marple.
There was a conscious decision by the makers of ITV’s Poirot series to set every story* in 1936, regardless of what year the book was set in. For reasons which were no doubt financially and artisticly sound, but kinda reinforce the fossilisation you refer to. Haven’t studied the ITV Marples sufficiently (too many liberties with plot for my liking) but I think they may have been similarly ‘infected’.
*with the exception of Mysterious Affair At Styles
The upside being that they have had some lovely High Modernist houses in the Suchet Poirots… Ustinov, I seem to remember, played Poirot both in period and non-period versions. Is that right?
On ITV this morning as Bank Holiday filler they had a modern-set, US TV Murder On The Orient Express from 2001. Cheap looking, a bit like an episode of Relic Hunter, with the train quite obviously leaving and arriving at the same station. Firmly up-to-that-minute, with the Lindbergh figure from the book becoming a dotcom millionaire – and Poirot using a search engine to work out some of the connections between the passengers, which seems like a bit of cheat. Characters also constantly explaining why they didn’t fly instead. HP played by Alfred Molina, in a standard characterisation made odd by his massiveness. The biggest deviation is that HP has been in Istanbul solving a case for his slinky, nightclub-owning GIRLFRIEND…