Tag: Murder She Said

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Murder most Margaret

 

© George H. Brown Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

During the past fortnight I’ve wondered if I should post something about big, recent news stories. About, for example, the draw for next year’s FIFA World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the USA, which happened on December 5th and saw FIFA President Gianni Infantino present Donald Trump with something called the FIFA Peace Prize.  Doing this, boldly going where no brown-noser has gone before, Infantino surely set a new record in how far a shameless groveller could wedge their head up Trump’s arse.  Or about the cascade of claims by pupils at London’s Dulwich College in the 1970s that the young Nigel Farage was a dedicated follower of fascism, taunting Jewish schoolmates with comments like “Hitler was right” and telling black ones, “That’s the way back to Africa.”

 

But no.  It’s Christmas-time.  I don’t want to soil the festive atmosphere of good will by writing about revolting specimens of humanity like Infantino, Trump and Farage.  So, instead, here’s a post about someone wholly wonderful and cherishable – Margaret Rutherford.

 

Wake Up Dead Man (2025), the new whodunnit written and directed by Rian Johnson, starring Daniel Craig as the gloriously accented Benoit Blanc, has just arrived on Netflix.  The Blanc movies – which also include Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022) – are reminders of how entertaining whodunnits can be when done well.  They put me in mind of an earlier series of cinematic whodunnits I find delightful and turn to whenever I need a comfort watch.  These are the four Agatha Christie adaptations made in Britain in the early 1960s that have veteran English actress Margaret Rutherford playing Christie’s formidable, if elderly, crime-solver, Miss Jane Marple.

 

By then, Rutherford had become a national treasure in Britain for her comic roles in the theatre and cinema, for example, in stage and screen versions of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1939 and 1951 respectively) and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1941 and 1945).  The Miss Marple movies represent the last great hurrah of her career.

 

One aspect of the films I have a problem talking about is their faithfulness to the original novels.  That’s because I’ve never read any of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories.  Indeed, I’ve only read one Agatha Christie novel ever, 1932’s Peril at End House, which featured her other famous sleuth, the Belgian Hercule Poirot.  However, having seen later versions of Miss Marple in TV adaptations where she was played by Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan and Julie McKenzie, it seems fair to say that the persona Rutherford invests the character with is not the persona Christie had in mind.  Subsequent Marples have been quiet, focused and forensic, people you’d barely notice sitting in the corner of the drawing room while skullduggery was afoot.  Rutherford’s Marple is a force of nature – you’d definitely notice her before long.

 

Christie was reportedly unhappy with the Rutherford movies, regarding them as comedies rather than the mystery stories she’d written originally.  That’s true – they are comedies, very funny ones, rather than mysteries.  But Christie seemed appreciative of Rutherford herself and even dedicated her 1963 novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side to her.

 

Though based on the works of a writer closely associated with the sub-genre known as the ‘country house mystery’, only one of the four Rutherford / Marple films mainly takes place in a country house.  That’s the first one, 1961’s Murder She Said, based on Christie’s 1957 novel 4.50 from Paddington.  Next up is Murder at the Gallop (1963), mostly set in a hotel run by an enthusiastic equestrian and foxhunter.  It’s based on Christie’s book After the Funeral (1953), which actually featured Hercule Poirot.  Murder Most Foul (1964), inspired by another Poirot novel, McGinty’s Dead (1952), is about murderous goings-on among the members of a theatre company.  The same year’s Murder Ahoy! is almost an original screenplay, though it uses elements of the 1952 novel They Do It with Mirrors.  Its story takes place on a former Royal Navy warship that’s become a floating reform school for juvenile criminals.

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

So, we’ve got a stately home, horse-riding, the theatre and the Royal Navy – four great British institutions.  Accordingly, in the films, the heads of these four institutions are played by four much-loved British character actors of the period, James Robertson Justice, Robert Morley, Ron Moody and Lionel Jeffries respectively.  Each is pompous and stuffy and when Rutherford’s Miss Marple arrives on the scene, determined to sniff out the rottenness in each institution – rottenness that’s led to murder – they aren’t happy.  That’s largely what makes these movies enjoyable.  We get to see some old-fashioned, patriarchal British pomposity being relentlessly pricked by an eccentric, infuriating old lady who refuses to know her place.

 

Indeed, I’d argue these movies are subversive in their quiet way.  Rutherford’s Miss Marple is almost a forerunner to Columbo, the disheveled, blue-collar detective played by Peter Falk in the TV show of the same name (1971-78, 1989-2003).  The murderers in that show are always rich, powerful bigshots who totally patronize and underestimate Columbo, but he manages to nab them in the end.  Usually by mercilessly annoying them.

 

I’ve seen people – usually diehard Christie fans – criticise Rutherford’s portrayal of Miss Marple for being ‘dotty’ or ‘batty’, but she’s not that way at all.  Rather, her Marple is admirably proactive.  In Murder She Said, convinced the body of a woman she saw being strangled on a passing train is concealed somewhere on the premises of Ackenthorpe Hall, she infiltrates the mansion by taking on the job of its housekeeper.  There, in the kitchen, she has to deploy all her culinary skills to feed the sizeable and demanding Ackenthorpe family.  Meanwhile, she uses her enthusiasm for the game of golf as cover while she searches the grounds.

 

In Murder at the Gallop, she climbs on top of a cartload of beer-barrels so that she can peer through a top window and spy on the reading of a will.  Later, she proves herself to be an accomplished horsewoman and she dances to some new-fangled rock-and-roll music.  (“One must be tolerant of the young…  I remember my dear mama was quite horrified when she caught me dancing the Charleston in public.”)  Okay, she apparently incurs a heart attack while dancing, but that’s only a ruse designed to trick the murderer into giving away their identity.  In Murder Most Foul she reveals herself as a past ladies’ pistol champion and, at the finale of Murder Ahoy!, as a fencing champion too.  That’s before she takes on the villain in a swordfight – a sequence Rutherford spent a month training for.

 

So, a skilled cook, golfer, horse-rider, dancer, shooter and fencer – she might be light-years removed from Christie’s concept of her, but Rutherford’s Miss Marple is a shining example of, simultaneously, girl-power and grey-power.

 

Her feistiness even wins her the admiration of those pompous authority figures she’s spent the films irritating.  At the end of Murder She Said, for instance, she gets a surprise when Luther Ackenthorpe, the irascible and bearish aristocrat played by James Robertson Justice, concludes that she’s just the woman to share his matrimonial bed.  His proposal of marriage hardly drips with romance, though.  “You’re a fair cook,” he tells her, “and you seem to have your wits about you and, well, I’ve decided to marry you.”  Predictably, Miss Marple decides there are some things a girl has to say ‘no’ to – and this is one of them.

 

Another unexpected marriage proposal comes her way at the end of Murder at the Gallop, this time from Robert Morley’s horse-loving character Hector Enderby.  Miss Marple isn’t taken by Enderby because he’s a keen foxhunter.  “I disapprove of blood sports!” she tells him sternly.  After she’s gone, Enderby sighs, “That was a very narrow escape.”

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

While Rutherford’s Miss Marple maintains her spinsterhood in these movies, the actress’s real-life husband, the actor Stringer Davis, has a prominent role in all four.  At Rutherford’s insistence, the filmmakers invented a recurring character, ‘Mr. Stringer’, for him to play.  No such character appears in the books.  It could have been a disastrous piece of self-indulgence, but in the context of the films this addition works beautifully.  Tweedy and timid, Mr. Stringer is the librarian in Miss Marple’s village.  She turns to him when she needs research done or information dug up and he invariably, and unwillingly, gets drawn into her unorthodox investigations.  He becomes a faint-hearted Dr. Watson to her gregarious Sherlock Holmes.

 

Davis and Rutherford dated for 15 years and didn’t tie the knot until 1945 when he was 46 and she 53.  The delay was due to Davis’s mother, who deeply disapproved of Rutherford, and the couple only got married after she died.  That might suggest Davis, intimidated by his mum, was as retiring as the character he plays in the films. But he was courageous enough to fight in both World Wars.  During the first one, he served as a young officer at the front in 1918.  At the start of the second one, he re-enlisted at the age of 40 and served for its duration.  His World War II experiences included being evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940.

 

The films’ other recurring character is a genuine Agatha Christie creation who appears in four of her books.  This is Inspector Craddock, played by Australian actor Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell.  Craddock starts each movie having his patience tested by Miss Marple’s meddling and wild claims but, of course, by the end of it, he’s reluctantly conceded she was right all along and is fighting her corner.  A veteran of the Australian film industry, Tingwell moved to Britain in the 1950s.  He’s forever etched in my memory as Alan Kent, the unfortunate traveller whose blood is used in a gory scene to revive Christopher Lee in the 1966 Hammer horror film Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) – the first scary movie I saw that genuinely scared me.  In the 1970s he returned to Australia, where his later films included the delightful and highly popular comedy The Castle (1997).  By the time of his death in 2009, he was so respected that he received a state funeral in Melbourne.

 

© Lawrence P. Bachman Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

Meanwhile, the guest casts in these films are a joy for someone of my vintage and geographical background.  They’re choc-a-bloc with faces familiar to me from watching TV as a kid – from either the 1960s and 1970s British TV shows or the 1950s and 1960s British movies that were broadcast then.  As well as Robertson Justice, Morley, Moody and Jeffries, there’s Francesca Annis, James Bolam, Richard Briars, Peter Buttersworth, Andrew Cruickshank, Finlay Currie, Windsor Davies, Meg Jenkins, Arthur Kennedy, Duncan Lamont, Miles Malleson, Francis Matthews, William Mervyn, Derek Nimmo, Nicholas Parsons, Conrad Philips, Dennis Price, Flora Robson, Terry Scott, Robert Urquhart, James Villiers and Thorley Walters.  Even a future Miss Marple, Joan Hickson, turns up in Murder She Said.

 

After Murder Ahoy!, Rutherford made one more appearance as Miss Marple.  She and Stringer Davis appeared fleetingly in 1965’s The Alphabet Murders, a Hercule Poirot movie with Tony Randall playing the Belgian detective and none other than Robert Morley playing his sidekick, Hastings.  I haven’t watched The Alphabet Murders, but it’s reportedly dreadful and Rutherford and Davis’s cameo may be the only good thing in it.

 

Admittedly, something that tinges my enjoyment of the Rutherford / Marple movies with a little sadness is knowing that a few years after making them Rutherford started to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.  Devoted to his wife, Stringer Davis cared for her until her death in 1972.  He died himself just 15 months later.

 

Anyway, I shall finish here as it’s time to go and watch Wake Up Dead Man on Netflix.  Hey, you know what?  If that Daniel Craig plays his cards right, he could become the new Margaret Rutherford.

 

From wikipedia.org

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Rab Foster makes a straw man argument

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is the name of a short story I’ve just had published using the pseudonym Rab Foster.  I always attribute any fantasy fiction I write to Rab Foster and, accordingly, this story is about an elderly witch who tries to enjoy a peaceful retirement in a remote farming valley, only to have her solitude disturbed by the local farmers, who beg her to use her magical powers to combat a fearsome and malignant totem that’s suddenly appeared at the top of the valley – the titular scarecrow at the titular Terryk Head.  The story appears in Issue 151 of the online Swords & Sorcery Magazine.

 

It wasn’t so long ago that I commented on this blog that I felt scarecrows had been overdone in fantasy fiction.  Well, I still believe that, but I thought the idea behind The Scarecrow of Terryk Head was good enough to justify the presence of a tattie-bogle (as we call the things in Scotland).  I have to admit the story was influenced, slightly, by scarecrows that appeared in the Thomas Ligotti tale The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, which was published in his 1991 collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works; and in a story featured in the 2010 collection The Mirror of Paradise by the Sri Lankan writer Asgar Hussein.  Unfortunately, I can’t remember what Hussein’s scarecrow story was called, and I haven’t been able to find its title online.  But I enjoyed it a lot.

 

Other influences on The Scarecrow of Terryk Head include, curiously enough, Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) and, yes, the Bronte sisters.  And, writing it, I had fun paying homage to a scene from the 1961 film Murder, She Said.  This was a cinematic adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novel 4.50 from Paddington (1957) and starred two of my all-time favourite performers, Margaret Rutherford and James Robertson Justice.  What, you may wonder, does a fantasy story about witches and scarecrows have to do with an old black-and-white Miss Marple movie?  Well, read the darned thing and find out.

 

For the next month, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head can be accessed here; while the main-page of the 151st edition of Swords & Sorcery Magazine, which contains two other stories and an essay, can be reached here.

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Cinematic heroes 2: James Robertson Justice

 

© Rank Organisation

 

This weekend saw the funeral of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who passed away on April 9th at the age of 99.  Anyone who’s read the political entries I’ve put on this blog won’t be surprised to hear that I’m not a monarchist, at least as far as Britain is concerned.  I’ve got nothing against the Queen, who seems boundlessly dutiful and decent as she pushes her 95th birthday.  I’ve even got nothing against the concept of a monarchy itself, if it means having a symbolic head-of-state who deals with all the ceremonial stuff like opening supermarkets and attending banquets while the government gets on with the actual business of running the country.  Elsewhere in Europe, small-scale monarchies like this seem to work perfectly well in the Low countries and Scandinavia. 

 

Unfortunately, I don’t think a country as dysfunctional as Britain, so neurotically obsessed with its past, and where the institution seems to bring out the worst in many people – obsequiousness, snobbery, jingoism, culture-warring and my-patriotism’s-bigger-than-your-patriotism flag-shagging – could cope with having a small-scale monarchy.  So I think in the long run it would be better for Britain to just dispense with the monarchy and become a republic.

 

Anyway, enough of the political talk.  This seems an opportune time to repost this tribute I once wrote about one of Prince Philip’s close friends – the gruff, pompous acting marvel James Robertson Justice, whom the late prince once described as “a large man with a personality to match” who “lived every bit of his life to the full and richly deserves the title ‘eccentric’.”

 

Forgive the pun, but in a brief blog entry it’s impossible to do justice to James Robertson Justice.  By the time he embarked on an acting career – his first screen appearance was in the Charles Crichton-directed wartime propaganda movie For Those in Peril (1943), with his first substantial role coming four years later in Peter Ustinov’s comic fantasy Vice Versa – he’d already amassed a professional CV that would put, say, Jack London’s to shame.

 

In London, he’d worked as a journalist at Reuters (alongside a 20-year-old Ian Fleming).  Then he’d upped and gone to Canada, where he’d tried his hand at selling insurance, teaching English at a boys’ school and being a lumberjack and gold-miner.  He’d worked his passage back to Britain on a Dutch freighter and during the 1930s served as secretary and manager to the British ice-hockey team.  He’d also had a go at being a racing driver, served as a League of Nations policeman and fought for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.  In World War II he’d been invalided out of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve because of a shrapnel injury.

 

On top of his decidedly varied working experiences, James Robertson Justice was a polyglot.  According to whom you believe, the number of languages he could speak were four, ten or twenty.  He was also a keen birdwatcher and falconer – the latter enthusiasm earning him the friendship of Prince Philip – a raconteur and bon viveur with an eye for the ladies and a penchant for fast and expensive cars, and perhaps most passionately of all, a would-be Scotsman.  Although he’d been born in Lewisham in London in 1907, to a Scottish father, Justice told everyone that he’d been born in the shadow of a distillery on the Isle of Skye.  People believed this and it was only in 2007 that a biographer, James Hogg, discovered his birth certificate and his non-Scottish origins.

 

To cement his Scottish credentials, Justice served as rector of Edinburgh University from 1963 to 1966 and in the 1950 general election he ran unsuccessfully as the Labour candidate for the Scottish constituency of North Angus and Mearns.  Despite his friendship with the Queen’s husband and his taste for fine living, Justice’s politics were firmly of the left.  One of the languages he could speak was Scottish Gaelic.  And he must have been proud that he starred in the most charming of old Scottish comedy movies, 1949’s Whisky Galore.

 

© Rank Organisation

 

A larger-than-life character in reality, it’s unsurprising that fame, when it arrived for Justice, was a result of him playing a larger-than-life movie role.  1954’s Doctor in the House, based on the comic novel by Richard Gordon, follows the mishaps of four medical students (Kenneth More, Donald Sinden, Donald Houston and soon-to-be-a-star Dirk Bogarde) while they bumble, philander and idle their way through their studies at the fictional St Swithin’s Hospital.  Its irreverent tone struck a chord with British cinema audiences, whose patronage made it the biggest grossing film of the year.  That’s ‘irreverent’ in strictly a 1954 sense, however.  Bogarde and co seem a pretty mild bunch of rebels even by the standards of the 1950s, which a couple of years later would see the advent of rock ‘n’ roll.  And as biting and unruly medical satire goes, Doctor in the House isn’t exactly on par with, for instance, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H* (1970).

 

In fact, the film would seem flat and stodgy today if it wasn’t for Justice’s turn as the chief surgeon at St Swithin’s, the hulking, pompous and delightfully ogre-ish Sir Lancelot Spratt.  The scenes involving Spratt are still capable of prompting guffaws – particularly the one with the famous ‘What’s the bleeding time?’ joke.

 

Steamrollering through the hospital wards and corridors and dragging a dazed trail of matrons, nurses and junior doctors in his wake, treating his underlings like dirt and so disdainful of the working-class patients that it’s debatable whether or not he considers them capable of thought, Spratt could be seen as the socialist-leaning Justice’s piss-take of a pompous upper-crust Tory doctor, one who’s been thrust against his wishes into the brave new Labourite world of Britain’s fledgling National Health Service.  The truth is simpler, though.  Justice was simply playing himself, or at least the side of himself who liked fancy cars, caviar and royalty.

 

The success of Doctor in the House and the popularity of Spratt meant that he was immediately typecast.  He’d spend the remainder of the 1950s, and the 1960s, playing variations on the role – comically-blustering aristocrats and authority figures who believed themselves entitled to behave any way they pleased and who didn’t give a tinker’s cuss what other people thought about it.

 

One exception to the rule was the memorable John Huston-directed, Ray Bradbury-scripted film version of Moby Dick in 1956, in which he played Captain Boomer.  Also, in the 1961 adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone, he played the commodore at Allied Command who rounds up Gregory Peck, David Niven and the gang and sends them off to blow up the big German guns of the title.  Otherwise, comedies and pomposity were the order of the day.  Justice played Spratt in six more Doctor movies, where the quality inevitably went down each time, and played many more Spratt clones.  His performances, however, were never less than hugely entertaining.

 

© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

One of my favourites is his turn as the unbearably bear-ish aristocrat Luther Ackenthorpe in 1961’s Murder, She Said, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington, which starred the venerable Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple.  The lady detective takes on a job as a maid in the Ackenthorpe household in order to investigate a possible murder, and predictably she and Justice spend the film getting on each other’s nerves.   Miss Marple receives a shock at the end because Justice, despite the antagonism that’s existed between them, has concluded that she’s just the woman to share his matrimonial bed.  His proposal of marriage hardly sweeps her off her feet, though.  “You’re a fair cook,” he tells her, “and you seem to have your wits about you and, well, I’ve decided to marry you.”  Unsurprisingly, Miss Marple manages to turn down his proposal without much soul-searching.

 

Justice is also good in the 1962 comedy The Fast Lady.  It has a great cast – Julie Christie, making only her second film appearance, the suave Leslie Philips and the legendary Glaswegian comic performer Stanley Baxter.  Mind you, when I saw part of it on YouTube recently I found its humour a lot less sophisticated than how I remembered it from multiple TV viewings when I was a kid.  Justice plays a rich and arrogant sports-car enthusiast, a role that was obviously no leap for him, who runs gormless cyclist Baxter off the road.  When Baxter tracks Justice down to his country manor to complain, he falls in love with Justice’s daughter, Christie, while Robertson, chugging around on a riding lawnmower, mangles Baxter’s bicycle into his lawn.  There follows a romantic comedy of manners, with Baxter trying to win Christie’s hand and earn her father’s respect.  I remembering seeing an interview with Baxter wherein he reminisced about the film and, adding yet another string to Justice’s bow, recalled how his co-star had been an authority on butterflies.

 

Shortly after playing yet another cantankerous and wealthy old bugger, Lord Scrumptious, in 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – based on the children’s book by his old Reuter’s colleague Ian Fleming – Justice suffered the first of several strokes that would hobble and then finish his film career.  By the time of the last Doctor film, 1970’s Doctor in Trouble, his appearance as Sir Lancelot Spratt had been reduced to a cameo.  His final role was an appropriately Scottish-themed one, 1971’s The Massacre of Glencoe.  As the work petered out, so did his money, and in 1975 he died a sick and bankrupt man.  All in all, it was a sad and undignified end for one of the British cinema’s most flamboyant and gloriously imperious figures.

 

From worldoffalconry.co.uk