George Pollock (1961)
Murder, She Said turns out to be an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 From Paddington. I read it in my early teens and one of the interests of the film came from realising that bits of the book have remained buried in my memory for forty years. As soon as the local doctor appeared, I remembered he was the murderer; his unusual name, Quimper, has stayed with me too. Arthur Kennedy is surprisingly cast as Quimper (this appearance is sandwiched between Elmer Gantry and Lawrence of Arabia in his filmography); he’s a fine actor but here a mostly uncertain one and not just because of his character’s guilty secrets. As Quimper’s inamorata Emma, Muriel Pavlow, to look at, occasionally brings to mind Janet Leigh but Pavlow’s speech patterns – the lines punctuated with metronomic, breathy breaks to convey nervousness – are typical of British film actresses of her generation. Emma is the daughter of an irascible invalid called Ackenthorpe, played by the abominable James Robertson Justice, indulging in his usual self-absorbed, showoff routine. Thorley Waters is amusingly snide as one of Ackenthorpe’s sons and it’s nice seeing cameos from Peter Butterworth (as the ticket collector on Miss Marple’s train from Paddington) and Richard Briers (as a man who runs a domestic employment agency). As often in Margaret Rutherford films, her real life husband Stringer Davis is in evidence (as a kind of all purpose helpmate to Miss Marple). The partnership is endearing, for all that Davis is an incorrigibly coarse actor.
Margaret Rutherford has a wonderful ability to harness innate eccentricity to naturalistic technique and discipline. (Arthur Lowe, on the small screen anyway, displayed a similar combination of talents.) Her Miss Marple may be nothing like Agatha Christie’s but Rutherford’s gawky gusto and comic invention in the role are unfailingly entertaining. The high point of Murder, She Said – in retrospect – is the moment when Rutherford arrives at Ackenthorpe Hall (Miss Marple improbably goes under cover as a maid in the household) and Joan Hickson, who played Miss Marple so successfully on television a quarter-century later, opens the door to her. (Hickson plays an enjoyably miserable housekeeper here with offhand flair.) Without these two, Murder, She Said would be pretty undistinguished: even with them, it’s pedestrian – unlike its source material.
Although I can’t remember any of the detail of the book’s plot, I feel sure there was plenty of it. You get the sense that the screenwriter David Osborn has pared too much away to showcase Margaret Rutherford: even though she puts on a splendid show, the film still needs a stronger storyline. By far the oddest presence is someone called Ronnie Raymond, as Emma Ackenthorpe’s gruesomely mischievous nephew Alexander. Dressed in a collar and tie, with his hair slicked back, he looks like a rather effete miniature man. The light-coloured voice that emerges makes him seem like a woman in drag. Alexander’s lines come out over-elocuted too. The whole effect is very odd. A bizarre, unsubstantiated but plausible explanation can be found in the ‘Trivia’ section of Murder, She Said’s IMDB entry: ‘The voice heard for actor Ronnie Raymond … has been dubbed’. The abundant and peculiar music is by Ron Goodwin: it’s not very good but it seems ahead of its time to the extent that it evokes crummy British films trying to sound With It later in the decade. (As Sally said, it also foreshadows bits of the superior theme music, by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, for the BBC Miss Marple.)
30 April 2010
