Spoilers herein.
Dame Agatha must be turning and turning. She spends her energy finding that thin edge between disclose and confusion to tantalize us into a game. It is among the most engaging trick in all literature.
But along comes the heavy boot of TeeVee which (apparently) demands that people don't want to think, so jettison all the clues and games. Bowen's other adaptations usually plod on and surprise us all at the end. We are not detectives, but among the puzzled people in the parlor to whom explanations are made late.
But this is the worst. Christie often gives indirect clues by setting a theme: here it is illusion, the illusion of magic, of theater, of film, of ballet. He saves all this but makes it blunter. He saves some of the red herring events, but doesn't ripen any of them: what was the `student' doing by sneaking out?
Why do the brothers seriously chase a married woman? Of all the Hickson Marples, this one has the greatest distance between the coherence of the book and the incoherence of the adaptation.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
Dame Agatha must be turning and turning. She spends her energy finding that thin edge between disclose and confusion to tantalize us into a game. It is among the most engaging trick in all literature.
But along comes the heavy boot of TeeVee which (apparently) demands that people don't want to think, so jettison all the clues and games. Bowen's other adaptations usually plod on and surprise us all at the end. We are not detectives, but among the puzzled people in the parlor to whom explanations are made late.
But this is the worst. Christie often gives indirect clues by setting a theme: here it is illusion, the illusion of magic, of theater, of film, of ballet. He saves all this but makes it blunter. He saves some of the red herring events, but doesn't ripen any of them: what was the `student' doing by sneaking out?
Why do the brothers seriously chase a married woman? Of all the Hickson Marples, this one has the greatest distance between the coherence of the book and the incoherence of the adaptation.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.