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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 25 |
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MISS MARPLE DOES IT WITH MIRRORS
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Perhaps the Miss Marple cupboard is nearing empty
of TheColumnists.com
As I struggled to stay awake in "They Do It With Mirrors," the latest Miss Marple mystery, which premieres on PBS' "Masterpiece Mystery!" next Sunday night (9 p.m. on most PBS stations), I began to think heretic thoughts. Like, are they scraping the bottom of the Miss Marple barrel?
(Check your local market TV guides to make sure this program isn't playing at a different date and time in your area.)
I was prepared to be unhappy with Julia McKenzie as Jane Marple--the third actress to play Agatha Christie's elderly lady detective since "Mystery!" began its run more than 25 years ago--but that wasn't the problem. McKenzie is fine, although the late Joan Hickson remains my favorite--and most clearly the closest Marple to the original Christie vision.
No, I'd say I'm getting tired of watching the same Marple stories being remade over and over again. I never cared much for "They Do It With Mirrors" anyway. It has too many characters stuffed into the same old country manor house and not many of them really very likeable.
Though several of the Marple short stories haven't been filmed yet, I'll assume the British film producers don't think they're rich enough in plot to carry the movie-length episodes favored by "Masterpiece Mystery!" and the other venues for the Marple programs. Instead, they keep doing the same ones over again--or, even worse, adding Miss Marple to mysteries Christie wrote, but never put Miss Marple in as a character.
(Next week's finale of the current PBS Marple series is a fine example. Go look up the original novel version of "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?" If you can find Jane Marple anywhere in that story, you must be hallucinating.)
Otherwise, this edition of "They Do It With Mirrors" looks good, has some pretty good actors and all the typically opulent British manor houses, vintage cars and period costumes. Hey, it even has Joan Collins making a rare TV appearance as Marple's old friend Ruth van Rydock, the lady who asks Marple to help Ruth's sister, Carrie Louise Serrocold, who seems to be in some sort of danger.
How does Collins look these days? Well, let me first say that I was quite enamored of Joan Collins when I first saw her on the screen in the early 1950s. She was so sexy in "Land of the Pharaohs" (1955) that I had to take a cold shower after seeing it. But Joan is now 76 years old--at least!--and currently resembles someone well-coated in mortuary wax. Fortunately, she doesn't have much to do in this story except lend it some star name value.
The 1991 TV version of this novel, which starred Joan Hickson, was much better because it gave us some precious glimpses of what life had been like for Marple as a young girl--she and Ruth were childhood pals--and better interplay between Marple and her police detective antagonist, Inspector Slack, although this new version correctly has Inspector Curry as the police presence as Christie had in the novel.
An even earlier version, called "Murder with Mirrors," was done in 1985 by CBS with American actress Helen Hayes as Miss Marple, Bette Davis as Carrie Louise and, if you can believe this, Leo McKern, TV's beloved Horace Rumpole, as Inspector Curry. Hayes' sweeter, kinder Marple was all wrong and the film is the least interesting of the three.
Though I can understand why the Christie estate might prefer not to let writers create new stories for Miss Marple, I think that would be a far better solution than taking non-Marple stories by Christie and wedging the character into them whether she fits or not. The less interesting Marple novels, like this one, don't get better when they're rehashed endlessly.
Geraldine McEwen, the last to play Marple, brought a more youthful zest to the role that was at least an attempt to do something interesting. McKenzie's Marple has more blood in her than Hickson's portrayal did, but avoids the occasional "cute" moments of McEwen's Marple. She's a hybrid, I guess. She doesn't bother me, but her performance isn't so inventive that it makes me want to see her go through all the old Marple stories over again.
Time for some relief, PBS. Better no Marple than these recycled yarns that no longer carry any surprises.
©2009 by Ron Miller. This column first posted July 13, 2009.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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