Posted by Carola
D.E.
Ireland is a team of award-winning authors, Meg Mims and Sharon
Pisacreta. Long time friends, they decided to collaborate on this unique
series based on George Bernard Shaw's wonderfully witty play, Pygmalion, and flesh out their own version of events post-Pygmalion.
MURDEROUS
HITS AND MISSES
As we write
this, the film Gone Girl is still weeks away from its October
release. There are legions of fans around the world hoping the book
will be as suspenseful and riveting as Gillian Flynn’s corker of a
novel. We’re right to be nervous about the outcome. Many excellent
mystery and suspense novels have been turned into cinematic misfires.
Others, however, hit their mark with deadly aim. Sharon and Meg
briefly discuss their favorite film adaptation of a mystery, and ones
they are still trying to forget.
Sharon:
One especially egregious example was the film adaptation of Carolyn
Hart’s Dead Man’s Island. This book launched the wonderful
series featuring Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins, aka Henrie O, a retired
newspaper reporter. Our intelligent heroine is caught up in a
first-rate mystery while trapped on an island during a hurricane.
With a dead body, a colorful cast of suspects, and a nice twist at
the end, how could the movie go wrong? Well, it did. I knew we were
in trouble when girlish Barbara Eden was cast as the no-nonsense,
sixty-something Henrie O. Everything went downhill from there.
By the way, I
have nothing against Barbara Eden; she made a lovely genie. But the
blond glamorous Eden seemed like an Orange County housewife, and not
a retired famous journalist with graying hair and a penchant for
jogging suits. Eden also seemed unable to imitate a Texas accent.
Actually very little about the movie was convincing or suspenseful.
The film also starred William Shatner, Traci Lords, and Morgan
Fairchild – which only added to the misery of watching it.
My favorite
Agatha Christie novel is Death on the Nile. It is a
quintessential Christie story starring Hercule Poirot, and peopled
with a beautiful heiress, an archaeologist, a socialite, a spurned
lover, a French maid, an untrustworthy lawyer, a Communist, and a
romance novelist by the delicious name of Salome Otterbourne. Cast as
Poirot, Peter Ustinov was far taller than the little Belgian. But,
being the consummate actor he is, Ustinov was entirely convincing.
Small changes were made to the script that differed from the novel;
these largely involved deleting several secondary characters. However
the alterations did not change the story arc, nor make the movie any
less entertaining than the book. Unlike Dead Man’s Island,
the cast was spot on, the script faithful to Christie, and all of it
filmed on location in Egypt. With a sweeping musical score as well.
Of course, it’s hard to go wrong with a cast that includes Bette
Davis, Angela Lansbury, David Niven, and Maggie Smith. I have a
feeling that Miss Christie would have been as pleased by the 1978
film as I was.
Meg: For
a movie I can’t get out of my head, I’ll go for the gore of
Sleepy Hollow. I actually enjoyed the movie, except for
closing my eyes whenever another head rolled. Washington Irving’s
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow – published in 1820 – isn’t
a true mystery, being based on a German folktale about a ‘headless
horseman’ who rides through the wild woodlands. The lovely Katrina
Van Tassel’s hand, along with a sizable dowry, is at stake. Two
rivals emerge – schoolmaster Ichabod Crane (an outsider to the
community) and the local prankster Brom Bones. Tensions escalate when
Brom relates local legends at a party held at the Van Tassel farm.
When Katrina turns down Crane’s marriage proposal, he heads home to
Sleepy Hollow but encounters a mysterious figure who carries his head
on the saddle. After a horseback chase, Ichabod escapes across a
bridge, where the horseman throws his head in Crane’s face.
The movie with
Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci and the villainous Christopher Walken
certainly was a mix of both horror and mystery. Sleepy Hollow
morphs the hapless, mooning schoolmaster Ichabod Crane into a 1799
New York City police constable who is sent to the remote hamlet to
investigate several gruesome killings. Crane has an interest in
new-fangled gadgets which help him perform autopsies and lift
fingerprints (just go with it, although historically it was another
hundred years before Bertillon invented the technique).
Locals blame the
beheadings on a headless Hessian soldier, who takes center stage.
Brom Bones is a local hero whose head rolls. The movie’s pretty
cool, given the Tree of the Dead clotted with the victims’ skulls,
the twisty plot and many exciting chases through the woods and into
the local windmill. Overall, much better than the short story if you
love a great Hallowe’en-themed movie.
As for a
disastrous adaptation, I’ll choose the 1965 film of Agatha
Christie’s The ABC Murders starring Tony Randall. While I
loved Randall’s work in other films, he was totally wrong as
Hercule Poirot. He walks like an American, talks like a Frenchman
(abhorrent to the Belgian character – French music even plays while
Randall and Robert Morley walk in London), and his movements are
stiff and clumsy. Horrors!
The dialogue in
the screenplay – meant to be comical – comes off as
cringe-worthy. Morley makes a goofy Hastings. Randall only stares at
Margaret Rutherford who makes a cameo appearance (and an astute
observation), but even that seems wrong. One would expect the two to
compare notes.
The 1992 television adaptation of the novel, with the perfect David
Suchet as Poirot and Hugh Fraser as Captain Hastings, as well as
Philip Jackson as Inspector Japp, is far better. The book deserved
better treatment.
The ABC Murders is one of Christie’s most
intriguing plots, with a serial killer who leaves an ABC railway
guide at each crime scene. He begins with Andover tobacco shop owner
Alice Ascher as the first victim, then B exhill waitress Betty
Barnard, and Sir Carmichael Clarke of Churston. When the pattern is
broken, Poirot falls back on a simpler solution to the murders.
Christie at her best, but the 1965 film butchered it – even Dame
Agatha was displeased.
Good or bad,
murderous movies do give viewers a 3-D picture – but often the book
is much better. Being mystery novelists ourselves, we are not at all
surprised.
