The Witness for the Prosecution
Jan. 10th, 2017 07:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessI caught up with The Witness for the Prosecution, which included words I’m fairly sure Christie didn’t write. I don’t think I’ve read the book, but I can’t be sure – I went through a Christie phase when I was in my teens.
I know this was all about Toby Jones owning Christmas for the BBC, but Riseborough had a real silent movie star presence (as well as being the young queen of accents, which she got to show off) in foggy post-war London, murkily lit.
The cat walking all over her dead owner’s body and leaving bloody paw prints before licking her fur before it got matted was gross, and also a sign of police incompetence – I know forensics wasn’t a thing, but respect for the dead? Of course, we got plenty of police brutality as well.
I was already suspecting the snobby, possibly repressed lesbian maid before Mayhew, although he should have asked why Leonard’s shirt was ripped, because it felt like ‘she said’ vs. ‘they said’ – in the break between watching the first part and the second part, in the middle of the case, I was presuming the audience was the jury. The influence of class abounded, especially in the first part from Mayhew’s ambulance chasing and lack of the barrister’s wig and gown, to Leonard in court.
But the second part was also about generational conflict and the pervasiveness of the gaseous toxins of world war one. I’d had some sympathy for Mayhew and his grieving wife, but they turned out to be horrible and broken too.
The prosecution made its case, which contained a lot that was circumstantial and suppositional – we had to wait for the defence to demolish a lot of it, which was fun. I got an explanation for what an Austrian girl was doing in Belgium – I’d wondered about that - but not until the end was there an explanation for Leonard burning the shirt.
The scene with ‘Christine’ was a bit gothic, but bigamy seemed like a good reason for their not being married.
And then Mayhew got cocky. I’d always thought that the maid as a repressed lesbian made her a type that Christie might use as a killer, and while I did believe in Leonard’s truthfulness, the longer it all went on, the more I dropped the maid and expected there to be another reversal. The maid killing the cat was a sign of a disordered mind, and she was clearly under great distress in the court and during the hanging, but I started half-expecting Leonard not to be the honest fool he’d seemed, especially as there was so much story left to be told from the running time.
I also wondered if Mayhew had tried to pay Christine, actually.
(I’m not entirely convinced that Romaine would have shared Riseborough’s facility with accents.)
Anyway, the reveal that Leonard and Romaine were in cahoots, hardened and out for themselves after the war and the way they’d planned and executed it was convincing, although the way the show had led us up the garden path felt irritating.
It was most of all because I had almost bought into the way the grieving Mayhews saw their son in Leonard, but the show would have it be All About Leonard, and his wife holding it against him, and both of their idee fixes ‘You came back.’ ‘I did it for you.’ colliding against each other, although Mrs Mayhew had had enough of being forced to have sex and lying and decided to rearrange the parameters of their relationship to suit her more, which is understandable. I will say that some of the attempts to make it more feminist felt like a stretch to me. One was left glumly wondering if she’d feel a little bad after her husband killed himself and glumly enjoying the fact that Leonard had realised the price of tying himself to a conspirator (even though he’d done the actual killing, Romaine felt like the puppeteer.)
It made for a depressing watch. If the Beeb are going to continue to adapt Christies with no Poirot or Marple to dispense justice, they can stop airing them at Christmas. The plot was not as good as the probably peerless ‘And Then There Were None’.
Also, I think they reprised Romaine singing that moon song three times too many.
I know this was all about Toby Jones owning Christmas for the BBC, but Riseborough had a real silent movie star presence (as well as being the young queen of accents, which she got to show off) in foggy post-war London, murkily lit.
The cat walking all over her dead owner’s body and leaving bloody paw prints before licking her fur before it got matted was gross, and also a sign of police incompetence – I know forensics wasn’t a thing, but respect for the dead? Of course, we got plenty of police brutality as well.
I was already suspecting the snobby, possibly repressed lesbian maid before Mayhew, although he should have asked why Leonard’s shirt was ripped, because it felt like ‘she said’ vs. ‘they said’ – in the break between watching the first part and the second part, in the middle of the case, I was presuming the audience was the jury. The influence of class abounded, especially in the first part from Mayhew’s ambulance chasing and lack of the barrister’s wig and gown, to Leonard in court.
But the second part was also about generational conflict and the pervasiveness of the gaseous toxins of world war one. I’d had some sympathy for Mayhew and his grieving wife, but they turned out to be horrible and broken too.
The prosecution made its case, which contained a lot that was circumstantial and suppositional – we had to wait for the defence to demolish a lot of it, which was fun. I got an explanation for what an Austrian girl was doing in Belgium – I’d wondered about that - but not until the end was there an explanation for Leonard burning the shirt.
The scene with ‘Christine’ was a bit gothic, but bigamy seemed like a good reason for their not being married.
And then Mayhew got cocky. I’d always thought that the maid as a repressed lesbian made her a type that Christie might use as a killer, and while I did believe in Leonard’s truthfulness, the longer it all went on, the more I dropped the maid and expected there to be another reversal. The maid killing the cat was a sign of a disordered mind, and she was clearly under great distress in the court and during the hanging, but I started half-expecting Leonard not to be the honest fool he’d seemed, especially as there was so much story left to be told from the running time.
I also wondered if Mayhew had tried to pay Christine, actually.
(I’m not entirely convinced that Romaine would have shared Riseborough’s facility with accents.)
Anyway, the reveal that Leonard and Romaine were in cahoots, hardened and out for themselves after the war and the way they’d planned and executed it was convincing, although the way the show had led us up the garden path felt irritating.
It was most of all because I had almost bought into the way the grieving Mayhews saw their son in Leonard, but the show would have it be All About Leonard, and his wife holding it against him, and both of their idee fixes ‘You came back.’ ‘I did it for you.’ colliding against each other, although Mrs Mayhew had had enough of being forced to have sex and lying and decided to rearrange the parameters of their relationship to suit her more, which is understandable. I will say that some of the attempts to make it more feminist felt like a stretch to me. One was left glumly wondering if she’d feel a little bad after her husband killed himself and glumly enjoying the fact that Leonard had realised the price of tying himself to a conspirator (even though he’d done the actual killing, Romaine felt like the puppeteer.)
It made for a depressing watch. If the Beeb are going to continue to adapt Christies with no Poirot or Marple to dispense justice, they can stop airing them at Christmas. The plot was not as good as the probably peerless ‘And Then There Were None’.
Also, I think they reprised Romaine singing that moon song three times too many.
