PBS has been showing “Miss Marple” episodes from the 1980s, part of the Masterpiece Mystery series.
There have been many Miss Marples (Misses Marple?) over the years but Joan Hickson was the only one who portrayed the amateur detective the way Agatha Christie wrote her. Last night my local PBS station showed “A Murder is Announced,” which was first aired in 1986. I looked up Joan Hickson while I was watching it (I often keep IMDB up and open when I’m watching anything), thinking what a good job the makeup people did–she looked exactly like a plain, dignified elderly woman. Well, she was born in 1906, so she was in fact, 80 when the episode was filmed.
Some other Miss Marples have deviated from the essential Christie character, making Jane Marple perky, or witty, too smiley, or too robust. One of them even winked! :eek: Miss Marple would never wink.
Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple is a well-brought-up woman who knows who and what she is. She speaks softly, but not hesitatingly, and she is clearly aware of the extent of her gifts. She asks the detective to let her question one of the subjects because (paraphrasing), “a policeman asking questions is serious, but an old woman asking questions is just an old woman asking questions.” When another elderly woman explains some errors in judgment due to her loneliness, Miss Marple says, “I know all there is to know about lonely old women,” and “You are truly alone when the last person who remembers the old days is gone.” You sense there is a clear mind and a kind and unsentimental heart behind her pointed (but never barbed) comments.
And I love it when she grasps the essentials of the case and then explains them in a comradely whisper, peer-to-peer, to a completely clueless police detective-- “Oh, but of course you see that it couldn’t have been the Colonel in the library with the candlestick, because he is clearly allergic to beeswax.” Then, as the light dawns, the cop pretends that he, too, “got it” at the beginning like she did.
Although I would say that at least an honourable mention should go to Dame Margaret Rutherford. She’s terrific fun, although her movies may seem a trifle dated next to Hickson’s.
I particularly liked Hickson in the adaptation of one of Christie’s later works,*** At Bertram’s Hotel***.
One objection people sometimes make to old-fashioned mysteries like Christie’s is that they’re too nostalgic, too backward looking, too wedded to an image of Old England that no longer exists.
At Bertam’s Hotel makes it clear that both Agatha Christie and Miss Marple are only too well aware that London has changed, the world has changed, even dear old St. Mary Mead has changed. Indeed, Miss Marple becomes suspicious that something evil is going on at the hotel precisely BECAUSE everything is too perfectly quaint. She recognizes that the world is SUPPOSED to change, and that there’s something artificial, unhealthy and unsavory about any person or institution that remains stuck in an idealized past.
Which is funny, because all of Christie’s mysteries were written during the downfall of Old Englande, and reflect that in fairly gritty detail. A Murder Is Announced is all about housing shortages and rationing and the black market and foreign refugees. A Pocket Full Of Rye is all about the nouveau riches–as is Jason Rafiel, a key recurring character in A Caribbean Mystery and Nemesis.
Hickson is also my favorite Miss Marple, and “A Murder is Announced” is one of my favorites of that series–I was just watching it a few weeks ago when I was doing a “fest” for one of the other actors in it. So many murder mysteries like to make all suspects repulsive people, but I like the characters in this story, even the murderer.
Simon Shepherd and Samantha Bond really look like a believable brother and sister …
except that it turns out that they’re not. They’re a couple in love.
It also delights me that Kevin Whately was assisting in investigations before he went to work with Inspector Morse and eventually got his own series.
One little odd discontinuity: Inspector Dermot McCraddock (played by John Castle) is obviously meeting Miss Marple for the first time in this story. When he shows up again in “The Mirror Crack’d,” still John Castle so it’s the same character, but he’s now her nephew. It’s that way in the books, so it’s Christie’s continuity error, but funny they didn’t fix it one way or the other.
I do like Margaret Rutherford’s Marple, but of the most of the movies she made alter the plots of the mysteries too much. IIRC, one of them was originally a Poirot mystery.
I liked seeing him, too, and I was trying to discern whether he used a less “regional” accent in this show than in his role as Lewis. Could you tell? He didn’t have a lot of dialogue in the Miss Marple story.
I love that guy. I would welcome an inspection by him any day of the week. And twice on Sunday.
In “A Murder Is Announced,” I also loved the matter-of-fact treatment of the lesbian couple in their idyllic country cottage. The skinny, brash partner Hinch, is always poking fun at her chubby, soft mate Murgatroyd, and even insults her the way long-time couples do, but when
Murgatroyd is murdered, Hinch is utterly devastated and is alternately wracked with rage and deep grief. Heartbreaking to watch.
I love Hinch and Miss Murgatroyd, also, and love the deft–complete blase–handling of them. When the new Miss Marple series aired, it lost me by playing that up with look! lesbians! cross-dressing!!! and also by making Miss Blacklock and Bunnie a couple–which was likely not the case, in the book.
Don’t get me started on the more recent “Marple” series. They tried to make everything more lurid and less like ordinary people in little English villages, which was so much the charm of the original stories.
I can believe the first Hinch & Murgatroyd as a couple who owned and worked on a farm–Hinch scratching the pigs’ backs and Murgatroyd up a tree. The other couple didn’t look like anybody you’d see near a farm.
ThelmaLou, I think Whately’s Geordie accent is played down here, since it’s not meant to be part of his character as it is later on when he gets to be Robbie Lewis.
Me too, and here’s why I prefer that version to Joan Hickson: Joan Hickson looks entirely too vinegary. Miss Marple has fluffy white hair, not an iron gray bun. She should look like someone that people would like, as she has lots of friends scattered around. Joan Hickson looks like your mean old aunty who only had horehound drops for candy.
Other than that, I agree with the OP 100%. I didn’t like the two who came after her on Masterpiece Mystery (I can’t remember their names, and don’t care enough to look them up).
I never saw ***Murder Is Announced *** on TV and never read the Agatha Christie story it was based on. So, I don’t know if Christie intended Hinch and Murgatroyd to be lesbians.
But here’s the thing: Miss Marple is a great detective precisely because she comes from a small village, the kind of village where everybody knows everybody, and everyone knows everybody’s business (think of the country song “Everybody Dies Famous in a Small Town”). And when you know everybody else’s business, it’s rather hard to be shocked by anything people do.
You think, say, an old lady from a small town in Mississippi in the 1930s knew nothing of sexual perversions? Guess again. Everyone in her town knew that various neighbors were a little… different, and most of the time, that was just taken for granted.
If Miss Marple HAD encountered a gay couple in a Christie story, she probably would have observed nonchalantly, “Back in St. Mary Mead, Mr. Bentley the Latin teacher and Mr. Chauncey the chemist lived together for thirty years. Everyone politely described them as old bachelors, but…”
Except she would have said simply and without irony, “Back in St. Mary Mead, the two bachelors Mr. Bentley the Latin teacher and Mr. Chauncey the chemist lived together for thirty years.”
IIRC, in a later book her nephew sends her away on vacation (A Caribbean Mystery?) and she sets up a young man to look after her house while she’s gone. She says “he’s house-proud, you know,” and lets it go.