Murder is Easy
Jan. 29th, 2024 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessOr as it’s officially known: Agatha Christie’s ‘Murder is Easy’
Background: I thought it would be a genius idea to read (or possibly reread, I’m never sure with Christie) ‘Murder is Easy’ as it was the Beeb’s Christie Christmas adaptation, but once I did, I wasn’t that bothered about watching the adaptation because I knew who did it. And then I realised Morfydd Clark was in it. As I thought the book was slight, a two-parter seemed about right.
Episode 1
There have been quite a few changes, the most obvious being to set it nearly two decades later and make Luke Fitzwilliam Nigerian (and not a former police officer.) Some of it I get, such as making him present at Miss Pinkerton’s death (as played by Penelope Winton, looking just a bit like Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple), putting Luke on the spot for more of the murders by changing the timeline. That felt like a valid book to televised drama change. They pruned the characters (including combining the vicar with the doctor who died), made his wife Indian and Rose mixed race and ditched the dabbling in Satanism. They also changed some characters’ ages. In the book, there’s more of an age difference between Lord Whitfield and Bridget, and here Matthew Baynton seems a bit old to be playing ‘whippersnapper’ Dr Thomas. I just…Hugh Laurie did a good job playing it straighter with ‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’, respecting the original and that Christie might have known what she was doing.
I don’t mind bringing a more modern critique of the colonialism and racism, which was there in Christie’s oeuvre and of its time. But it all felt Very Pointed here, (especially as Luke still has his sexist moments, as in the book, although I like him as portrayed by David Jonsson more than I did in the original.) The working class shadow village was pointed too. Oh, and the vicar was pretty rude as a guest of Lord Whitfield’s, even if he and the major had cause when he was cheating at tennis (as he did at life, as pointed out when he boomed ‘WARTIME PROFITEERING.’) But they did a good job of pushing the flirting on Bridget and Luke’s first meeting (and then it dropped off, nothing like Galadriel/Halbrand levels of maintained UST) and I loved the costumes.
Episode 2
I remained dubious about whether the changes were worth it: here Dr Thomas is a conflicted racist. Baynton was fun playing slimy, and I did think the character didn’t deserve Rose in the book, but he didn’t get killed off in the book! Having all these deaths within hours of each other and expecting the newly bereaved Hunderbys to attend an engagement party felt like a bit much. (Also, I spent the whole scene where Luke lays flowers at Miss Pinkerton’s freshly turned grave snarking that there ought to be a lot more of them around it.)
It all got even more pointed with the Major saying he and his wife were done with Empire when a detective tried to arrest Luke (or whatever his preferred name was in this adaptation) because he’d been a bit nosy and was black. (He was a bit worse than nosy, accusing everyone left, right and centre.) We got a bit of a lecture about Lord Whitfield’s collection of goods collected (stolen) from all over the world – granted, it was leading up to the knife that would be a potential murder victim, but subtle all this was not. Oh, and we had characters banging on and on about power structures to make sure we were getting what was going on in front of our eyes.
Although it honoured the fact that Bridget was on to the real killer before Luka AND he owned up to it, the way they changed the timeline, just to bring in working class Englishwomen emulating righteous Nigerian women, diluted something genuinely powerful in the book (that women suspected the killer) for the screenwriter’s agenda. Also, the age changes made this Miss Wynfleet talking about ‘us old women’ ridiculous. She and Gordon Whitfield were barely middle aged. And for that matter, making Lord Whitfield a wartime profiteer made all his belief in Providence and him being a man of God (while here too a vicar was now a victim of this ‘providence’…) and dismissing the book’s discussion of the nature of evil to Race/Class/Power, well, the changes to the original had just created new problems.
And was all that palaver about Luke’s dreams worth it? (No.)
And then we didn’t get the pay-off of Luke/Bridget, as he chose to return to Nigeria and Fight for Independence and she was just going to drive around in her natty car with no idea of how she would pay for the petrol? Weirdly, she almost quoted ‘Gone With The Wind’ and uttered a sentiment that they tried on in Sanditon about how great it was to be a woman in 1954 (er, okay, things were better than for English women of the same class in the early 19th century, but you go trying to get a mortgage or a better job than being a secretary, Bridget…)
Still, the costumes were very easy on the eye, Sinead Matthews, Tom Riley and Douglas Henshall hammed it up just enough. I suppose the take-out should be that adapting Agatha Christie with a modern take isn’t easy.
Background: I thought it would be a genius idea to read (or possibly reread, I’m never sure with Christie) ‘Murder is Easy’ as it was the Beeb’s Christie Christmas adaptation, but once I did, I wasn’t that bothered about watching the adaptation because I knew who did it. And then I realised Morfydd Clark was in it. As I thought the book was slight, a two-parter seemed about right.
Episode 1
There have been quite a few changes, the most obvious being to set it nearly two decades later and make Luke Fitzwilliam Nigerian (and not a former police officer.) Some of it I get, such as making him present at Miss Pinkerton’s death (as played by Penelope Winton, looking just a bit like Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple), putting Luke on the spot for more of the murders by changing the timeline. That felt like a valid book to televised drama change. They pruned the characters (including combining the vicar with the doctor who died), made his wife Indian and Rose mixed race and ditched the dabbling in Satanism. They also changed some characters’ ages. In the book, there’s more of an age difference between Lord Whitfield and Bridget, and here Matthew Baynton seems a bit old to be playing ‘whippersnapper’ Dr Thomas. I just…Hugh Laurie did a good job playing it straighter with ‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’, respecting the original and that Christie might have known what she was doing.
I don’t mind bringing a more modern critique of the colonialism and racism, which was there in Christie’s oeuvre and of its time. But it all felt Very Pointed here, (especially as Luke still has his sexist moments, as in the book, although I like him as portrayed by David Jonsson more than I did in the original.) The working class shadow village was pointed too. Oh, and the vicar was pretty rude as a guest of Lord Whitfield’s, even if he and the major had cause when he was cheating at tennis (as he did at life, as pointed out when he boomed ‘WARTIME PROFITEERING.’) But they did a good job of pushing the flirting on Bridget and Luke’s first meeting (and then it dropped off, nothing like Galadriel/Halbrand levels of maintained UST) and I loved the costumes.
Episode 2
I remained dubious about whether the changes were worth it: here Dr Thomas is a conflicted racist. Baynton was fun playing slimy, and I did think the character didn’t deserve Rose in the book, but he didn’t get killed off in the book! Having all these deaths within hours of each other and expecting the newly bereaved Hunderbys to attend an engagement party felt like a bit much. (Also, I spent the whole scene where Luke lays flowers at Miss Pinkerton’s freshly turned grave snarking that there ought to be a lot more of them around it.)
It all got even more pointed with the Major saying he and his wife were done with Empire when a detective tried to arrest Luke (or whatever his preferred name was in this adaptation) because he’d been a bit nosy and was black. (He was a bit worse than nosy, accusing everyone left, right and centre.) We got a bit of a lecture about Lord Whitfield’s collection of goods collected (stolen) from all over the world – granted, it was leading up to the knife that would be a potential murder victim, but subtle all this was not. Oh, and we had characters banging on and on about power structures to make sure we were getting what was going on in front of our eyes.
Although it honoured the fact that Bridget was on to the real killer before Luka AND he owned up to it, the way they changed the timeline, just to bring in working class Englishwomen emulating righteous Nigerian women, diluted something genuinely powerful in the book (that women suspected the killer) for the screenwriter’s agenda. Also, the age changes made this Miss Wynfleet talking about ‘us old women’ ridiculous. She and Gordon Whitfield were barely middle aged. And for that matter, making Lord Whitfield a wartime profiteer made all his belief in Providence and him being a man of God (while here too a vicar was now a victim of this ‘providence’…) and dismissing the book’s discussion of the nature of evil to Race/Class/Power, well, the changes to the original had just created new problems.
And was all that palaver about Luke’s dreams worth it? (No.)
And then we didn’t get the pay-off of Luke/Bridget, as he chose to return to Nigeria and Fight for Independence and she was just going to drive around in her natty car with no idea of how she would pay for the petrol? Weirdly, she almost quoted ‘Gone With The Wind’ and uttered a sentiment that they tried on in Sanditon about how great it was to be a woman in 1954 (er, okay, things were better than for English women of the same class in the early 19th century, but you go trying to get a mortgage or a better job than being a secretary, Bridget…)
Still, the costumes were very easy on the eye, Sinead Matthews, Tom Riley and Douglas Henshall hammed it up just enough. I suppose the take-out should be that adapting Agatha Christie with a modern take isn’t easy.
