Geraldine McEwan was an actress who, in the right part, always was superb. The fact that she brought her tricks to Marple and wasn't redirected bothered me considerably at first, but on watching the episodes again I find I can just think of them as showing Emmeline Lucas Pillson playing Miss Marple. As everyone knows, Lucia was incapable of playing or pretending to be anyone but herself.
And her work is in the hands of mad revisers and tasteless tinkers with the Christie corpus.
And thus my response is that it all looks pretty, Ms. McEwan always is a sight for very sore eyes, many of actors and actresses are either fine or pretty or both, and it's all an honestly silly camp piece. You can't find better support than what Eileen Atkins and Tom Baker do to consume the scenery like Formosan subterranean termites. You could cut your finger on Saffron Burrows' jawline, and Paul Nicholls and Greg Wise have great legs.
With the posing of the bodies, red herrings played like they've been dead on the beach for four days, and that exasperating twinkle in Marple's eyes that makes you hate her as much as the detectives do at times, it's easy fun.
But read the books for Christie for pure Marple as the character changes over time from an interfering, smart gossip to the genius eventually embodied by Joan Hickson. Hickson's position, supported in theory by Christie's saying she would be her own choice for the role, concludes that a person as brilliant as Jane is would also be quiet, careful, country-refined-with-knowledge of the world, serious, and aware at all times that the microcosm is the macrocosm.
With all that, this is as representative of the shambling approach of these production as any. Its pleasures are those described, down to Mr. Wise's wet underwear scene and the cuckoos one hears with one's critical e
Three items, though.
Fourteen years ago a person wrote here of the three plot changes, saying this was a case of a story therefore being (practically) unaltered. No, there are at least five major changes, with the fourth being the suppression of the failed-suicide MacWhirter character in the story who saves Audrey at the cliff and who would eventually marry her. With his being gone, Audrey weds Royce, which denies the fact that Christie wanted symmetry and to avoid the creepiness of Royce marrying his murdered brother's fiancee. She plainly did not love the remaining Royce, who she already bypassed for two other men. Royce was meant to discover that his long obsession for Audrey was not love, which frees him to love Mary Aldin. Symmetry AND self-realization.
The fifth is the removal of Inspector Battlement (and his nephew), who appeared in five novels, to accommodate the insertion of Miss Marple. The pretext is Jane "sketching" in the vicinity of her old school friend. Ugh.
Finally, another quibble is that a poster from 2021 comments "statistically" about Miss Marple "murder" statistics exceeding normal experience by x percent (The datum shown being a typo, it is not possible to know what was intended). Both nominator and denominator appear to be wrong. As a statistician looking at a simple rate, I would first suggest that the 12 cases noted is erroneous, in that additional to the 12 novels noted there were 20 short stories, making. I also do not know what population risk for being "exposed" to murder was used. So when considering this or other surmises of Miss Marple's (over)exposure to homicide (with many stories having more than one murder, as well) over her long career, I would suggest saying that Jane lived in an England and traveled where environmental poisoning, family disorder and psychopathy were rampant and leaving it at that. Comparing her experience to Jessica Fletcher's is an insult to St. Mary Mead.
If you do not find this review helpful, I understand. Thank you.
And her work is in the hands of mad revisers and tasteless tinkers with the Christie corpus.
And thus my response is that it all looks pretty, Ms. McEwan always is a sight for very sore eyes, many of actors and actresses are either fine or pretty or both, and it's all an honestly silly camp piece. You can't find better support than what Eileen Atkins and Tom Baker do to consume the scenery like Formosan subterranean termites. You could cut your finger on Saffron Burrows' jawline, and Paul Nicholls and Greg Wise have great legs.
With the posing of the bodies, red herrings played like they've been dead on the beach for four days, and that exasperating twinkle in Marple's eyes that makes you hate her as much as the detectives do at times, it's easy fun.
But read the books for Christie for pure Marple as the character changes over time from an interfering, smart gossip to the genius eventually embodied by Joan Hickson. Hickson's position, supported in theory by Christie's saying she would be her own choice for the role, concludes that a person as brilliant as Jane is would also be quiet, careful, country-refined-with-knowledge of the world, serious, and aware at all times that the microcosm is the macrocosm.
With all that, this is as representative of the shambling approach of these production as any. Its pleasures are those described, down to Mr. Wise's wet underwear scene and the cuckoos one hears with one's critical e
Three items, though.
Fourteen years ago a person wrote here of the three plot changes, saying this was a case of a story therefore being (practically) unaltered. No, there are at least five major changes, with the fourth being the suppression of the failed-suicide MacWhirter character in the story who saves Audrey at the cliff and who would eventually marry her. With his being gone, Audrey weds Royce, which denies the fact that Christie wanted symmetry and to avoid the creepiness of Royce marrying his murdered brother's fiancee. She plainly did not love the remaining Royce, who she already bypassed for two other men. Royce was meant to discover that his long obsession for Audrey was not love, which frees him to love Mary Aldin. Symmetry AND self-realization.
The fifth is the removal of Inspector Battlement (and his nephew), who appeared in five novels, to accommodate the insertion of Miss Marple. The pretext is Jane "sketching" in the vicinity of her old school friend. Ugh.
Finally, another quibble is that a poster from 2021 comments "statistically" about Miss Marple "murder" statistics exceeding normal experience by x percent (The datum shown being a typo, it is not possible to know what was intended). Both nominator and denominator appear to be wrong. As a statistician looking at a simple rate, I would first suggest that the 12 cases noted is erroneous, in that additional to the 12 novels noted there were 20 short stories, making. I also do not know what population risk for being "exposed" to murder was used. So when considering this or other surmises of Miss Marple's (over)exposure to homicide (with many stories having more than one murder, as well) over her long career, I would suggest saying that Jane lived in an England and traveled where environmental poisoning, family disorder and psychopathy were rampant and leaving it at that. Comparing her experience to Jessica Fletcher's is an insult to St. Mary Mead.
If you do not find this review helpful, I understand. Thank you.