Miss Marple: The Murder at the Vicarage (1986)

Overrated

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Blistering performances.

Lifeless. Boring. Dull. Awkward. Disjointed.Bad directing, acting, casting, editing, music. Colorless, ugly buildings and backdrops. The actors have even less life in them. Not to mention Joan Hickson's lisp. They can't finish a scene in this episode without jumping to 4 or 5 others first. David Horovitz's interpretation of Inspector Slack is one dimensional- he's just abominably rude to everyone with no zeal or enthusiasm for his work.Utter tripe. Try Geraldine McEwan's version; at least it won't put you to sleep.

This is a quasi perfect murder that turns sour because of completely secondary moralistic considerations that should never have come up in the minds of two criminals. But it is the feminine touch of Miss Marple and Agatha Christie. They cannot admit the viciousness of a woman, at least to that point. It is also the presence of the vicar and his vicarage that makes the tale more moral than it should be. A criminal is far beyond redemption when he or she starts planning and preparing, especially when he or she is not alone in the business. A crime of passion can lead to a guilty conscience, but not a premeditated crime with a plotting accomplice. But once again Miss Marple targets people who are living in at least divided circumstances. The main victim is a colonel who has a daughter from an earlier wife and is re-married to a quite younger woman. He is wealthy for sure but he has a very bad character, if not temper, and that makes him a difficult person to live with in private and public life, which provides him with a lot of enemies.

Spoilers herein.Watching all these BBC Marples is a real treat visually because you get a different director each time, and usually a different writer. That way, there is as much discovery in how the translation is made as there is in the mystery itself.But T R Bowen adapted seven of these and they are the worst of the bunch. That's because he truly believes in the TeeVee model: the viewer doesn't want to think about what is going on. There is no game between writer and reader. The TeeVee viewer just wants to pleasantly take up time and be surprised by the clever solution.Christie never intended such a thing, and railed against it in her lifetime. Her own plays show that intelligent engagement with the audience is possible,This Bowenization is a case in point. The novel idea here is that the detective herself provides the mistaken alibi. A pretty clever idea in 1930, already copied many times by the time this production is set. The book has it as a matter of self-confrontation; that's why we have the mad curator, and the introspection of the dying woman, and the painter.All that is washed away in this TeeVee script. Shame on Bowen and curses to viewers who don't complain.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

It is difficult to understand ITV's decision to remake the Miss Marple series, because in Joan Hickson we have the definitive interpretation of Agatha Christie's amateur sleuth. This particular story, Miss Marple's first fictional outing,dates from 1930, but the writer, T.R. Bowen has skilfully updated it to the 1950s. The script is witty and the cast is endowed with such acting stalwarts as Paul Eddington and Rosalie Crutchley. If the plot does not seem so original now it is because Christie's work was so often copied, and what must have seemed innovative in 1930 now appears to be hackneyed. All that said it is a story well told and worth a couple of hours of anyone's time.