Agatha Christie Collection: Caribbean Mystery

In the 1980s Agatha Christie Movie Collection, Helen Hayes plays Miss Marple. Although I consider the Joan Hickson films the most classic (and well-scripted) of all Christie tributes, I consider Helen Hayes to be the most similar to my own vision of Miss Marple.

The Caribbean Mystery (1983) is mostly accurate to the novel despite the novel itself being one of Christie's-hey-let's-kill-off-a-character-every-twenty-pages tomes. It brings up an issue that I've noticed with some television mysteries: we, the audience are supposed to be happy that the designated victim didn't get killed despite the fact that about twelve other people died in the meantime. One can't help but wonder, "If the murderer managed to take out the actual victim right away, wouldn't that have been worth the cost here?"

Hey, but at least the person who was being targeted didn't die!

Still, the movie is reasonably well-rendered and acted, and the villain is as unsettlingly horrible as required. The story also plays on one of Christie's neat psychological twists. Considering that Christie wrote her mysteries before evolutionary psychology was a "thing," she is remarkably insightful about how people's brains work.

A rambling elderly gentleman tells Miss Marple a story of a murderer. The gentleman says genially, "Want to see the photo of a murderer?" and goes to pull a photo out of his wallet. He looks at the photo, glances up, and gets an odd expression on his face. He immediately tucks the photo away. Miss Marple later surmises that the murderer was present; her conversationalist made the connection and got upset.

One of her fellow investigators queries, "But if he had the photo all along--?"

Miss Marple explains that the photo was simply a prop to the story. He pulled it out as the capstone to his narrative; he probably hadn't looked at it in years. This time, he just happened to glance at it, then looked up and saw the same face. 

She also explains that the elderly gentleman had many stories. Since Miss Marple wasn't really listening, she can't say whether the photo was connected to the story he started with or to another story that formed a kind of tangent. The listener's assumptions and the speaker's assumptions don't automatically dovetail. The phrase "a murderer" rather than "the murderer" could imply either a joking tone OR a reference to someone unconnected to the gentleman's original story. (Oh, and the gentleman is murdered himself, so he can't clarify what he meant--and he is murdered in a psychologically misleading way.)

By the end of the novel/movie, the answer (what the gentleman speaker did mean) seems obvious. It is Christie's strength that the natural human confusion that arises out of dropped pronouns and the habits of a garrulous storyteller would complicate the clear mystery arc.

Regarding Helen Hayes, she comes across as sweeter and less astringent than Joan Hickson. She captures the same sense of duty and careful balancing of clues. Like Thirteen for Dinner, this is a decent (if slightly too long) production.