What a thought this was–a detective who can’t shoot a gun, can’t survive a fistfight, and can’t even run away. What could be more original than that? A little old lady who lives in a village!
Joan Hickson was Agatha Christie’s choice to play Miss Marple, and didn’t get to do so until she was as old as Miss Marple. The result was well worth waiting for.
Forget about any other Marples. These are the best.
Yesterday Patty thought we needed a break, so she went to youtube and found us one of the funniest movies we’ve ever seen.
Clockwise (1986) stars John Cleese as Mr. Stimson, a headmaster at an English public school. In his youth, Mr. Stimson had a terrible problem managing time. He overcame it by becoming a pompous control freak obsessed with being on time, and has just been elected chairman of a national headmasters’ conference.
The premise is simple: Stimson has to go to the conference and give a speech. What ensues is a bizarre train of errors, each one worse than the last, as Stimson tries to make it to the conference on time. The cast is chock-full of persons you’ve already seen in many British sitcoms: Geoffrey Palmer (As Time Goes By), Stephen Moore (The Thin Blue Line), Anne Way and Pat Keen (Fawltey Towers), and Joan Hickson (Miss Marple, plus assorted Carry On movies), and several others. And they are all at their best! No one ever babbled and dithered better than Joan Hickson.
You’d think it’d be a fairly straightforward errand, to go to a conference and give a speech–but you wouldn’t believe how complicated it gets. It’s like one of those nightmares in which your feet stick to the ground, you lose your clothes, the police are looking for you, and so on. Those things aren’t so funny when they happen to you, but they’re a scream when they happen to John Cleese.
Laughter is one of God’s gifts, and not the least of them. And this film will give you barrels of it. Try it, you’ll like it.
We just watched Joan Hickson as Miss Marple in The Mirror Cracked, and once again I’m in awe of Agatha Christie’s creative genius. Nor does it hurt that these English productions starring Hickson are as faithful to Christie’s plots as humanly possible, and that Christie herself chose Ms. Hickson to play Miss Marple–quite a few years before Hickson was old enough to do it. She is absolutely perfect in the role: Miss Marple to the life.
But think of it. You don’t want it to be just another detective story, seen one, seen ’em all. But you don’t want it to be outlandish, either–nothing like a seven-foot-tall sleuth from Manchuria solving crimes by dipping strips of specially treated bacon into the suspects’ drinking glasses.
So you come up with a detective who is physically incapable of violence, physically unable to run away if she’s in danger, and outwardly the most harmless of all creatures–a little old lady who’s lived in a country village all her life, but has, in the words of one police superintendent, “a mind like a meat cleaver.”
How did Christie ever think of this? There’s never been a more believable detective than Miss Marple in all of crime fiction: this sweet little Christian lady who does her devotionals every morning before she gets out of bed, and yet has such a penetrating insight into the sinful human heart. It sounds unbelievable when I write it down like that; but she’s perfectly believable when you read the novels, or watch Joan Hickson bring her to life.
Wonderful artistry. Just wonderful.