Vintage agatha

During our round of Epsom charity shops yesterday we were lucky enough to come across a vintage box set of Miss. Marple films, vintage enough that that lady who sold them found it hard to believe that I had not heard of the star, one Margaret Rutherford.

Watched the first one last night, 'Murder, She Said', which turned out to the first adaptation of the '4.50 from Paddington', of which we already had the third, knocked out by ITV and Geraldine McEwan. Very entertaining it was too, making the McEwan version look a bit po-faced and a touch precious. I can see why Agatha (according to Wikipedia) might not of liked it, this very first adaptation of one of her Marple stories, with Rutherford having turned the thing more or less into farce, with an old lady stamping around the place in a most entertaining & improbable manner, absorbing two quite large characters along the way, Mrs. McGillicuddy and Miss. Eyelesbarrow. And quite large chunks of the book just vanished, only to reappear with the more respectful McEwan - or perhaps with Hickson in the missing BBC version.

The book was written in 1957 and the film was made more or less contemporaneously in 1961, while it was nearly fifty years old by the time that ITV got to it. In 1961 there was no need for the heritage side of the Marple brand as, for example, there really were steam engines, no need at all to roll the puffing Poirot out of its heritage shed. They even allowed a diesel electric to appear, a solecism which ITV would never have allowed. And, amusingly, in the film, the train went to a real place served by Paddington called Taplow, which, as it happened, I visited for the first time in my life on Friday (more on this in a post to come), while in the book the train goes to more fanciful places, including a Haling Broadway standing in for Ealing Broadway. But the film was careless enough to have this suburban train departing from Platform 1 which I thought used to be reserved for county types heading for Devon, rather than for the more mixed clientèle for Taplow.

Not quite sure why the thing was graded PG, containing as it did very little sex or violence, at least by the standards of 1989 when the DVD was issued.

The whole thing seemed much more stagey than a modern film, this despite the fact that this was a film made for cinema, itself by then near fifty years old, rather than for the relatively new television. The interiors seemed like stage sets and the dialogue seemed like that of a play, with the music mostly turned off while people were speaking, which meant that we could hear what they were saying.

We look forward to the remaining three films of the set. Just the thing for viewers a bit too old to really take to 'Game of Thrones'. Our version of the Morecambe & Wise which I used to sneer at older people for watching - and now I am older myself!

PS: I learn over breakfast that the amusement of paragraph 3 above falls in that I have confused if not conflated Taplow (see http://www.taplow.org.uk/) with the nearby Twyford (see http://www.twyford.co.uk/), the latter being the place visited via Paddington Station on Friday. But amusing instead that there should be two places with names so similar yet so different so close together.