Agatha Christie Page 13
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Two agonies of drama criticism – much less pressing now than they were – are to describe an intimate revue from last week’s unmarked programme, and to discuss almost any thriller at any time; the gentlest hint can alert a trained reader. Reviews of the later Christies were often sour; I suspected a sense of critical frustration. Not that anyone mocked the two post-Mousetrap plays: Witness for the Prosecution (1953), based on a short story, and Spider’s Web (1954).
Witness for the Prosecution was both her craftiest and most elaborate play (not elaborate in the Akhnaton sense). New York, where it had 646 performances, more than in London, agreed. Its people, in the theatre, were plausible, and anyone who divined the plot from those preliminaries in the Temple could have seen through a pair of stairs and a deal door. Call it a quick flame of the Theatre Theatrical; during its two and a half hours Witness never smouldered perilously. Leonard Vole was in the Old Bailey dock, on trial for murder, an ‘intricate impeach’ and a court scene as accurate as any in recollection; earlier, counsel and solicitor had debated the case in chambers; and we returned there, towards the end, for an episode in which Patricia Jessel disguised herself so surely, even reducing her height, that her mother did not recognize her. The last minutes of the piece startled me as much as a vital line from quite another context, the close of a venerable Wallace novel, The Crimson Circle (something, not that it matters, like ‘a crimson circle ran round the neck of Derrick Yale’).
Possibly chilled by its decoration, the Winter Garden, where you had to walk about a league to the front of the stalls, was not a lucky theatre. It had been long ago, with such matters as Kissing Time, Kid Boots, and The Vagabond King. Now Witness for the Prosecution, defying any hard-luck story, had an ovation comparable to the sustained hysteria after a musical. Peter Saunders said that, as Mrs Christie, overwhelmed, left her box, she whispered to him: ‘It’s rather fun, isn’t it?’ It was. Agatha Christie would not approach such success again, though she had an even longer run (774 performances to 468 for Witness) with Spider’s Web in 1954.
An even-tempered writer, she was not a mercurial humorist and never given to epigram. Spider’s Web, at the Savoy, had more genuine, counterpointing relief than in her other plays. This was, owing largely to Margaret Lockwood – technique matching technique – as a soaringly inventive diplomat’s wife, Clarissa Hailsham-Brown. (Clarissa was one of Mrs Christie’s names.) During the first act she had murmured to herself: ‘Suppose I were to find a dead body in the drawing-room? What am I going to do?’ Promptly she found the body and did quite a lot, wrapping her stories round each other like layers of onion-skin while the police waited, baffled and patient. An endearing play of its school and fortified by its steely construction, it did last five minutes too long: rare in a Christie, but nobody minded.
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Now, as a dramatist, she began a slow descent from the crest. It might be better to call this final period a sierra; among her last seven plays, four of them full-length, she could still achieve a run of 604 performances. In the background loomed The Mousetrap, part of the West End furniture. Established long before the so-called theatre revolution, when the English Stage Company was neither an idea nor a name, it has outlived new waves and second waves and trickling fashions.
Towards Zero (1956), first of the final group, had to be transient. Adapted (with Gerald Verner) from the novel, it opened on a late summer night at the old St James’s, uncomfortable but historic, and so exasperated a critic that he named the murderer (‘X did it’). Having missed the premiere, it was a useful test to see how a puzzle survived when one knew the crib. It managed a little better than I feared, a harmless affair, though minor Christie, and apt to be verbose. Instead of ‘Wait until you leave’, a character would say: ‘I think you would be advised to postpone further discussion until the termination of your visit.’ Old Lady Tressilian (Mrs Christie’s spelling) had been battered to death at a Cornish address, Gull’s Point, Saltcreek; the lethal instrument, niblick or fire-iron, was as blunt as a probing Scotland Yard superintendent was acute. Though the plot implied that Yard men might profitably take their vacations in Cornwall, I doubted the play’s value as a regional advertisement.
With, for a change, a Bloomsbury setting, Verdict (1958) had in the programme a note on the meaning of ‘amaranth’, and in the play the murder of a professor’s wife who suffered from a wasting disease. For once Mrs Christie composed her narrative less as a sorting-office for facts and inferences than as a play of character-conflict. Tepidly imagined, it had an irritating premiere; in some cue-light misunderstanding the Strand Theatre’s curtain fell half a minute before it should have done, and the gallery was not too pleased. Agatha Christie, resilient as ever, took only a month (Verdict’s entire life) to write The Unexpected Guest – whereupon, just as unexpectedly, it lasted for over 600 performances. We were now in a South Wales house, near the Bristol Channel, on a night blanketed in fog, the very weather for a murderer to slip by. I had just come up from holiday at my own village, The Lizard, so one line struck me forcibly: ‘I was lying awake listening to the booming of the foghorn – very depressing I always found it, sir.’ The play was by no means depressing: it might have boomed into space, but Mrs Christie used the fog subtly to blind and baffle. Even if weather had cleared by the time she asked us who shot the man in the wheelchair, we wandered in contented circles for the rest of the evening.
Serenity now for eighteen months. Then Hubert Gregg, who had directed The Unexpected Guest for Peter Saunders, staged Go Back for Murder (1960) at the same theatre, the Duchess. Founded on Mrs Christie’s Five Little Pigs, it lacked the mettle of Three Blind Mice. Who poisoned the artist a generation ago? A girl from Canada, determined to prove her mother’s innocence, arranges a replay sixteen years later on the scene of the crime (West of England). It was all marginal; we rarely entered the picture, for the people were as distant as the Egyptians of Akhnaton.
So, in December 1962, to the last of the acted Christies: a triple bill, Rule of Three, also at the Duchess. By then she could have echoed Matthew Arnold (that unlikely admirer of the melodrama of The Silver King) when he wrote:
… Repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of strongest souls,
And numb the elastic powers.
Three puzzles in a night might have been uncommon largesse. In the event, only the first play counted, a cunning Guignol brevity: one summer afternoon in a fifth-floor Hampstead flat furnished with such trifles as a Damascus bride-chest, a Kurdish dagger, and what seemed to be a gourd from Baghdad. Sharply, claustrophobically, the plot closed in like the walls of The Pit and the Pendulum. Good, but the rest of the evening slid away. Mrs Christie set Afternoon at the Seaside, central panel of her triptych, on a crowded beach at Little Slyppynge-on-Sea. The name hinted at strain. The anecdote, about the theft of a diamond necklace, was unexciting, and so too, until its curtain, was The Patient: a nursing-home, a private room, a woman paralysed from a fall over her balcony, a cross-fire of accusation, a complicated electrical device, and, suddenly, a stinging last line. After more than thirty years Agatha Christie could leave her stage with honour.
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Dame Agatha’s strength in the theatre was her power of plotting. She could do most things with a body, but it became increasingly hard to animate the gap between death and revelation. Usually people and dialogue were functional, though at times, as in the whole of Witness for the Prosecution, in much of The Mousetrap, in the second acts of The Hollow and And Then There Were None, in the incidental comedy of Spider’s Web, and in The Unexpected Guest, the stage could flash swiftly to life. Very few detachable lines keep a play in memory; humour often stiffened to mannerism. Someone says in Verdict: ‘I’ve never been to an inquest in this country. Are they always like this?’ A doctor replies: ‘Oh, they vary, you know; they vary.’ So did the Christie plays.
That admitted, Agatha Christie had more narrative impulse than anyone of her day. Frequently her
end would justify the means. She was a technician when, among critics, the word had mildewed. Our pleasure in her major puzzles was the pleasure of a testing anagram, of an exact mortise-and-tenon, of filling the space at 27 down and closing an awkward corner. In fine, the pleasure of solution, the answer to a precisely stated challenge. In the matter of life and death within her world of artifice, she could be past-mistress of the artificial: no leopardess, no organ at midnight, not even a vault. She failed when her heart was not with the problem (Towards Zero, Go Back for Murder, Verdict). When she had persuaded herself she could soon persuade others: in the period’s most rubbed jargon, there might not be many ‘insights’, but the machine did ‘work’.
Agatha Christie fortified the theatre of entertainment; she knew about plays of menace before the tag was modish. At least three of her plays should live beyond the century, and I hazard that critics then will be just as ingeniously allusive as our contemporaries. Because, in fairness, one cannot describe the plays in detail, references and analogies accumulate. In a moraine of Christie reviews I found allusions to Wilde (‘This shilly-shallying with the subject is absurd’), Webster (‘Their life, a general mist of error’), Sheridan (‘a very pretty quarrel’), Dickens, Pinero, O’Casey, Beerbohm, Gilbert, many more: Gilbert (this was from a notice in 1951) because of the gentle milkmaid’s response in Patience to ‘O, hollow, hollow, hollow!’ ‘It is not a hunting-song,’ exclaims Bunthorne, grieved, but what else, asked the writer, could it be in Agatha Christie? What indeed?
When, for a minute, there is silence, and argument (but not The Mousetrap) is over, we returned to the publicity man’s jingle long ago: ‘Pray don’t tell them how it ends.’ A dramatist who conceived so many secrets, and who kept them for so long, ought to be remembered, and I suggest, with affection, that Dame Agatha Christie will have her reward.
The Agatha Christie Films PHILIP JENKINSON
Agatha Christie was never as well served on film as her contemporary thriller writers from America. Hercule Poirot, her most filmed creation, never acquired the stature of Philip Marlowe or even Ellery Queen in his screen appearances, and of the feature films drawn from Dame Agatha’s work, only a few can reasonably claim to add to the status of the author of The Mousetrap rather than merely draw attention to it.
Even so, these films used a wide selection of often talented film makers and represented a curious cross-section of the film styles of the period in which they were made.
First out was Die Abenteuer G.m.b.H. (Adventure Inc.), made by Fred Sauer in 1928 from The Secret Adversary. It is not surprising that Germany with its enterprising film industry and its passion for the British crime scene – Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Wallace, Jack the Ripper and Dr Crippen – should be the first country to tackle this very British writer. In the cast may be noticed Eve Gray, the heroine of Dupont’s English films, Piccadilly and Moulin Rouge, and Michael Rasumny, the talented comedian of later Hollywood products.
The same year saw the production of The Passing of Mr Quinn, made by producer-director Julius Hagen. This effort starts rather slowly, with scenes of the unpleasant Professor Appleby mistreating his wife, played by Trilby Clark; he is soon ‘carrying on an intrigue’ with the maid, played by Ursula Jeans. The wife is so upset that she sends a letter to the wealthy tenant of the nearby house stating that she could kill the husband, who sure enough is poisoned. The wealthy neighbour and the doctor, played by the film’s star Stewart Rome, come to her aid. All is resolved in one of the flashback disclosures characteristic of the crime films of this period. This was derived from The Coming of Mr Quin (with only one ‘n’ incidentally).
In 1931 Hagen produced Alibi, derived from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This was directed by Leslie Hiscott, who had scripted The Passing of Mr Quinn. The film began a series in which Austin Trevor played Hercule Poirot. Trevor, who may be glimpsed in the English films of Korda and Hitchcock, was a competent actor but was totally overshadowed by a contemporary stage characterization by Charles Laughton in the part. Trevor did not attempt any kind of character performance – unlike his successors – and later commented that he thought he’d been given the role because he’d played a Frenchman in another film. One writer trying to puff interest in a later entry in the series pointed out that ‘the detective is described by the authoress as an elderly man with an egg-shaped head and bristling moustache. Austin Trevor is a good-looking young man and clean-shaven into the bargain!’
In Alibi, Poirot was called in to investigate the suicide of a widow loved by the well-to-do, but unpopular, village squire. Trevor was well received in the lead but the women in the film (Elizabeth Allen and Clare Greet) were less sympathetically reviewed and the standard detective format of deduction and revelation was followed.
Director Hiscott managed to keep things moving in his first film but after this his second entry, Black Coffee, was considered an anticlimax. The stage origins showed clearly, notably in the murder scene where Sir Claude Amory, played by C. V. France, rounded up his house guests and demanded that whoever stole his secret formula replace it on the table when he turned out the lights! Chief among the suspects were daughter-in-law Adrianne Allen and son Philip Strange, because she was being blackmailed for her guilty secret – her father was a famous Italian spy. Doctor Dino Galvani was responsible for this piece of evil doing, but Trevor as Poirot outsmarted the murderer, feigning drinking poisoned coffee. A passing word of praise should go to the camerawork of William Luff and Sidney Blythe – the latter one of the better British craftsmen of the day, who shortly after gave up movies to open a pub.
The cycle halted with Lord Edgware Dies, directed by Henry Edwards from the novel of the same name (called Thirteen at Dinner in America), once more for producer Julius Hagen. In this thriller Trevor as Poirot finds the identity of the murderer of the husband of the attractive but vain American actress, played by Jane Carr. The film was well enough acted, ingenious and spaced with several more murders, but by 1934 audiences were finding these entertainments talk-bound and the literal adaptation made one contemporary reviewer dismiss the film as ‘just another conventional mystery play’.
These films were played within the conventions of the indigenous British film industry of their day with plaster faked timber country houses, theatrical devices in both writing and staging and the ubiquitous ‘silly ass’ comics – played by John Deverell in Alibi or Richard Cooper in Black Coffee. Even the means of murder – hyoscine in the coffee – dates the films and the villain referring to Poirot as a ‘cunning swine’ as his most strong invective never quite rang with conviction. Like most of their contemporaries these British quota fillers seem to have totally vanished but one is bound to record that they are undoubtedly among the lesser of the cinema’s losses.
The first film that anyone – other than a veteran of habitual movie-going in the thirties – might reasonably be expected to have seen is the 1937 Love from a Stranger, derived from the play written by Hitchcock villain Frank Vosper, based on Mrs Christie’s short story ‘Philomel Cottage’. Here the director was an old Hollywood hand, Roland V. Lee, whose output, while uneven, contained several films of considerable interest: Zoo in Budapest, Cardinal Richelieu and Captain Kidd. He at least might have been expected to impose an assured film style upon the material but sadly this hope was not fulfilled; the talk-dominated form of the play producing an unconvincing and sluggish film.
The most interesting element was naturally the central performance of Basil Rathbone as Gerald, the fortune-hunter with a smooth line in murdering rich women. Rathbone was always a striking if unsubtle performer and even under-controlled here, gets all the attention away from Ann Harding’s Carol, whom he meets when inspecting the flat she puts up for sale after a lottery win. Soon, however, there are sinister happenings in the cellar of the country cottage in which the newly married couple settle. His heart condition brings the doctor, and with Miss Harding’s ex-suitor hovering about it’s not long until the photo of the bearded murderer, who s
trangely resembles the bridegroom, comes to light.
The film’s most interesting sequence is the climax, where Rathbone’s intention to murder Harding in the deserted cottage becomes clear and she has only her wits for protection. Pretending she has poisoned his coffee as part of her succession of murders she works on Rathbone’s weak heart and in an audaciously conceived sequence he strides back and forwards about her, trying to reassure himself and master his condition, towering over Harding and the camera.
The subject was again filmed as Love from a Stranger (A Stranger Passes in the UK, where the Rathbone film was still occasionally shown) in 1947, for Eagle Lion – an independent Hollywood company of the time. The script owed little to the adaptation by Frances Marion for the earlier film. (She had written, among others, The Big House.) The new version was one of a number of film scripts which Philip Macdonald, himself an established thriller writer, was then preparing. The Jacques Tourneur-Ray Milland English film Circle of Danger was, however, a much better example of his skill.
In the remake, Cecily Harrington wins the fifty thousand pound Calcutta Sweepstakes and into her life comes a charming, sinister new husband who proves to have the same dreadful secret. Even with an attempt to provide a more actionful climax this production was destroyed by its cheapness, its obvious studio setting – noticeable even in the exteriors – and poor playing. Time had not treated kindly the appearance of Sylvia Sidney since her great thirties performances, and John Hodiak made little headway in replacing his characteristic clean-cut GI style with the more sombre character he attempted here or in Desert Fury and Somewhere in the Night. Richard Whorf’s disappointing direction must largely be blamed. Indeed, the only participant to come out of the production with any credit was veteran cameraman Tony Gaudio, who held attention with his suggestion of electrical storms and the lamplit, remote house where ‘something nasty is going on in the cellar’.