Reviews

I love Ustinov's Poirot, seen at his best in Death on the Nile. (Don't watch this, watch that.) This film is so embarrassingly bad I've never been able to sit all the way through it. The makers seem to have thought "Death on the Nile was a hit - Christie, Ustinov, star cast, jokes - we'll do it again." The "hilariously catty dialogue" between Rigg and Smith is vulgar, unfunny smut, as is James Mason's dialogue. Rigg is forced to humiliate herself in a terrible song. Oh goody, the audience will laugh when Poirot goes for a swim in an antique bathing suit - he's fat, you know! And if you hadn't noticed, we'll put a tuba on the sound track! The script was written by someone who had never seen a joke, but had once heard one described. The Poirots Ustinov made with Jonathan Cecil, which are much more low-rent and set in the present day (the 80s) are far preferable, and actually, you know, not half bad.

A wonderful picture of London in the 50s, and an insight into the way people behaved, and were treated, during the war - patient crowds sitting on railway platforms waiting to be evacuated (Come along, ma! No, lad, you can't take that chicken!). I can't see or hear the married couples calling each other "darling" that another reviewer complained of - there's an engaged couple and he calls her "darling" about twice. Watch out for Joss Ackland as an eager copper and Jonathan Cecil as a young officer. The aging "actress" is simply wonderful and the relationship between her and Prof. Willingdon quite touching. ("He was a gentleman and I treated him as such - as he did me!") Lovely to see Joan Hickson as a cat-loving landlady, living in a house untouched for fifty years and crammed with Victorian nicknacks. What would they be worth now!

"somebody who's taught me that there are people willing to stand up for other people no matter what it costs them; somebody who's taught me about the kind of person I wanna be." What a piece of American feelgood tosh! Unfortunately it keeps interrupting the excellent dancing. DD was made in 1987, so the heroine has to be a politically aware young woman who stands up for the underdog. American movies love teaching lessons, and the lessons of the 80s are made to sound like something from the Reader's Digest. You don't think that's all they were all along??? Plus Baby falls into bed with Johnny far too quickly and easily for a 17-year-old in 1963. We barely knew the facts of life back then. But the clothes are nice, and little details like Mr Kellerman dancing with Honi Coles.

I have just caught up with this and it is as brilliant as people said it was at the time. But nearly 20 years have passed, and some things now jar. Nothing is as distant as the recent past. Paul and Jenny as the right-on, ideologically sound, politically correct couple are great, especially the way Jenny is boring and humourless and manipulates everybody by constantly bursting into tears and rushing from the room. People like that certainly were around back in those days. But they were hard to send up – possibly because they were so earnest and smug they could never see a joke, let alone one against themselves. I like the way Liz begs Jenny to stop the "progressive preaching". But there's something wrong about Jenny. Her clothes and hairdo are too conservative (though they're dull and unsexy because fashion is a capitalist plot, and being sexy is pandering to patriarchy...). Maybe they thought the audience wouldn't get it if she spoke like that, or wore the kind of clothes a feminist eco-protester would have worn. Her constant sermons seem to be a way of explicating her far-out ideas to an audience who may never have heard them before. Another false note is struck by Rita's conversion from downtrodden, shy, unconfident wife and mother to liberated single woman (with big, big hair and a ghastly shiny outfit) – just by having her husband leave her for another woman. She too starts spouting political sermons and reveals that she met her new boyfriend at a CND rally. She is a heroine for the late 80s and we're not meant to laugh at her as we laugh at Paul and Jenny.

I'd forgotten that way back then ideas that are now being embraced by the Conservative Party genuinely divided people. Conventional people had conservative ideas; if you wanted to go vegetarian or campaign against nuclear weapons you became a weirdo, a lefty, an unconventional person. Your original social group would look at you askance or possibly eject you. You might have to join another.

These are flaws that time has revealed. The rest stands up as great drama, acting and observation. Looking forward to catching up with the second series.

Agatha Christie would have been ashamed of a story this soapy and simplistic. What this film shows brilliantly is the way a big house like Gosford Park worked, who ran it and how. As the rich get richer, butler seems like a sensible career goal. We learn far more about the Downstairs crew than the Upstairs - I never worked out who was who, let alone who was married to whom. What did the fair bloke with the "common" wife have on the daughter of the house? Who was having relations with the kitchenmaid? Not one of the Upstairs crowd, I think - he was wearing a tail coat and must have been one of the footmen. The revelations about Lord McC's past in Isleworth are clunky to say the least. One thing we do find out: these people may be rich, but they're not noble. Lord McC, it's hinted, is a war profiteer, and his guests talk business at the dinner table. Real toffs don't do that - they don't have jobs. As for the "funny" detectives - they just aren't, and they don't hack it as parody.