I suppose the reasoning behind this was to make for more drama for the film. That murderer was quite clear: he had it coming and there wasn’t so much as a snip of guilt. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, the guilt, the shame, the agony of knowing they’d killed another person. I really didn’t like the other murderer’s suicide. The murderer was very careful about not harming the cat while trying to gas the victim. But rewriting Miss Marple’s plot to trap the murderer by having him murder an almost entirely new, made-up-from-whole-cloth character didn’t play well, particularly since much of it was shot in the dark.

I can accept characters being disappeared because 102 minutes doesn’t allow for a leisurely complex plot developments. I’m recalling the major rewrite of Lance Fortescue’s character in A Pocketful of Rye.Īnd the same proved true for The Murder at the Vicarage. Now that I think about it, maybe they didn’t. Allowing for the differences between film and text, the BBC does generally do it up fine, as they did with Hickson’s four previous outings as Miss Marple. If you’re showcasing a major fictional character, why not do it right? Tell the story the way the author intended. Thus, it behooves the BBC to produce an adaptation that is true to the text, since far more people watch TV than read. She then went on to star in her first novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, and if people know Miss Marple at all, this is probably the one most people are familiar with. Miss Marple made her debut in the short story collection The Thirteen Problems (retitled The Tuesday Club Murders in the United States). That makes it harder to understand why Anne Protheroe has an affair with him and why stepdaughter Lettice is jealous and catty about Lawrence’s affections. The poacher, Bill Archer, must have stolen all of Lawrence Redding’s virility. I’m looking at you, Lawrence Redding, louche painter and sex magnet. The pacing was off, the dialog was murky in the extreme, large sections were shot in the dark, and some characters were so underplayed as to have all the liveliness of a Ken doll. I did not like this Joan Hickson outing nearly as much as the others I’ve seen to date. Glad that rascal was dead because he had it coming. They killed him and they were glad glad, I tell you. The plan to trap the murderer is radically different and, worst of all, one of the murderers commits suicide out of remorse. The usual changes of condensing or removing characters, some of whom were important (Dr.

Joan hickson the murder at the vicarage