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There remains something invincibly old-fashioned about the characters and
situations of this updated Agatha Christie whodunit. Furthermore, the film
(loosely adapted from Christie's 1945 novel) has been designed to serve a dual
purpose: as a modest murder mystery, and as a springboard for a prospective
mystery series.
The piece is taken in a formal manner and with rather undue seriousness by
its makers, indicating a keenness to establish the basic elements of a series
(which never emerged) featuring the low-key government agent sleuthing of Oliver Ford Davies' somewhat doddery Colonel Reece and his more astute colleague and partner Dr. Catherine Kendall (a level-headed, unruffled Pauline Collins); the Tommy and Tuppence of the
senior citizen league. Their involvement in the plot (not in the Christie
original, of course) is simply by the excuse that one of the dinner party guests
was a government minister in line for promotion (and therefore must be seen to
be 'squeaky clean').
This modernised version is set around the seemingly cutthroat milieu of
professional football, populated by various backbiting, self-seeking types. They
include the ferocious, multi-millionaire club owner George Barton (Kenneth
Cranham, craggy of voice and face); Iris Marle, style guru to celebrities;
Lucilla Drake, stepmother to the murdered woman and her sister, Iris; Lucilla's
sullen son Mark; Ruth Lessing, Barton's mousy personal assistant; the
high-flying Sports minister Stephen Farraday and his wife Alexandra. As each one
becomes a jittery suspect after the poisoning of Barton's young wife so the film
becomes largely an exercise in neurosis.
The storyline makes few demands on its actors, though Collins and Ford Davies
make an interesting pair of elderly undercover agents (suggesting an offbeat
pairing of George Smiley and Beryl Reid's Connie Sachs from Tinker Tailor
Soldier Spy, BBC, 1979); and the tracking down of the murderer is more a matter of simple
mathematics than of any developed logic in either plot or characters. (Once a
certain amount of screen time has been devoted to the pursuit of each red
herring, only a process of elimination would appear to lead to the selection of
the killer in the final minutes.)
Basically an intriguing crossword-puzzle thriller, it is neither slick nor
succinct enough to satisfy the demands of the genre, but there is still a great
deal more to enjoy than to carp at.
Tise Vahimagi
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