Marple: The Moving Finger (2006) (TV)

User Rating:

6.8/10   

Director:

Tom Shankland

Writers:

Agatha Christie (novel)
Kevin Elyot (screenplay)

Release Date:

12 February 2006 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | Mystery | Romance | Thriller

Plot:

Troubled war veteran Jerry Burton and his sister Emily rent a cottage in a seemingly tranquil English village which is plagued by a spate of poison pen letters... and murder.

Plot Keywords:

Poison Pen Letter | Vicar | War Veteran | Miss Marple | English Village

Cast

Geraldine McEwan	...	Miss Marple
James D'Arcy	...	Jerry Burton
Ken Russell	...	Reverend Caleb Dane Calthrop
Frances de la Tour	...	Mrs. Maud Dane Calthrop
Thelma Barlow	...	Emily Barton
Jessica Hynes	...	Aimee Griffith (as Jessica Stevenson)
Sean Pertwee	...	Dr. Owen Griffith
Imogen Stubbs	...	Mona Symmington
Harry Enfield	...	Richard Symmington
Kelly Brook	...	Elsie Holland
John Sessions	...	Cardew Pye
Rosalind Knight	...	Partridge
Emilia Fox	...	Joanna Burton
Ellen Capron	...	Agnes
Talulah Riley	...	Megan Hunter

Also Known As:

Agatha Christie - Marple: The Moving Finger (Australia) (DVD title)

Runtime:

93 min

Country:

UK | USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

Australia:M

Filming Locations:

Chilham Castle, Chilham, Kent, England, UK

Company:

Agatha Christie

Goofs:

Continuity: Mrs. Symmington can be seen quite clearly standing next to her husband attending the funeral for the murdered maid Agnes Brown. Mrs. Symmington was murdered and buried before Agnes Brown. In fact, Agnes attended Mrs. Symmington's funeral.

Quotes:

Inspector Graves: I can't help feeling , sir, that in this case, our man is a woman, if you get my drift.

Movie Connections:

Remake of The Moving Finger (1985) (TV)

Chattered

I liked this production a lot. And that's in spite of it being one of Christie's lesser works. She usually plays one big game per story, some fundamental innovation in the form. This time, its the removal of Marple as the primary detective. Usually the form is we have Marple, who we follow. She's the detective and there is a second, "official" detective in the mix, usually no more than background noise.

In this case, we have a troubled war veteran, suicidal. Its him we follow, as he deduces and discovers, and part of what he watches is what Marple is up to. By this time in Marple's career, the charm had gone out of the series, so far as reliance on the primary character. So we have here the two body problem of the two amateur detectives, the three body problem adding in the police, and the many-body situation since everyone in the village is hunting for the note-writer.

Oh. The guy who's our detective? Two years previously he played a shockingly modernized Sherlock Holmes!

And we have three attractive women circling around our hero: his quirky sister (here the designated redhead), a sexy earth mother, and an innocent waif (who in the final, transformative scene is lit so her hair is red).

So the story is structured less around episodes and more around observation than usual. That's why this adaptation works so well. Viewers seem to get upset when the plot is adjusted in the translation from word to image. So they like this one because in that respect it "follows the book." I guess they missed that it radically changes the narrative stance — the most important part in detective fiction. Oh well, I suppose there are bigger blind spots in the world.

What the filmmaker has done here is shoot visions at us with relentless speed. We have long sequences with less than a second to two second shots. Sometimes they do jump briefly to perspectives that would normally be called "arty" but in this case it constructs a many-eyed world. Its darn effective, and shows some understanding of what detective fiction and film is all about. Its too good for TeeVee, at least this one is.

One small touch that I liked was the way the notes were handled. These were letters (presented to us as images) constructed by taking letters out of books. Its an incidental thing in the book, but in this film — which does select the big letters to paste together for us — it matters, a sort of side annotation, a tiny meta-narrative. These books are the ancient texts that seem to be the focus of the vicar, who is an obvious red herring as he wears gloves and is reflexively judgemental.

He's played by by Ken Russell, and that alone is the biggest hoot of my moviewatching week. Watch "Lair of the White Worm" and then this to see what I mean.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.