How NOT to portray a character...

This last week, Geraldine McEwan (1932-2015) died. Many of you will not know who she was and, indeed, had I not known of one particular aspect of her career as an actor, I would be oblivious also. In her later life, Geraldine McEwan became familiar as the latest in a growing list of people who tried to portray Miss Marple in a television series based on Agatha Christie’s oeuvre.

For my money, you can’t go wrong reading Christie’s material (although maybe not her romance novels which she published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott). If you’re running a Call of Cthulhu campaign and you want to recreate the atmosphere of the 20s and 30s, it’s all right here in black and white: the language, the social mores, the furniture. And with it, is the evil that people do to each other. These are good stories, well told, and well worthwhile for those wanting to catch a flavour of the times. What you don’t want to do, is decide to watch the shows that the BBC have churned out over the past several decades: this is a minefield of misinformation which will definitely lead you astray. Remember the episode of “Seinfeld” where George tried to avoid the bother of reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s by watching the movie instead? Like that, but worse.

Agatha Christie was never happy with the attempts to film her two most beloved characters. She thought Peter Ustinov was all wrong as Poirot and she refused to acknowledge Margaret Rutherford’s portrayal of Miss Marple, the only two representations which emerged during her lifetime. Her loathing of the Rutherford Marple is easy to see, since it was a portrayal geared for a certain period taste, and, for those with some deeper knowledge of her work, for a host of personal and psychological reasons.

Christie was one of a handful of women who emerged in the 20s as the Dames of Crime Fiction. The list includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham; there were others but these will suffice. Each of them wrote stories in which the central mystery was unravelled by a detective – amateur or otherwise – who was invariably male. In their earliest stories, these detectives are arch and peculiar: it takes a few stabs before the rough edges get knocked off them and they become more acceptably real. Initially, Poirot reads like a Cubist painting; Roderick Alleyne is simply a name which no-one can pronounce; Lord Peter Wimsey is a badly-drawn Bertie Wooster and Albert Campion is a seething mass of Parkinsonian tics. Once their individual authors got comfortable with them, only then did they become ‘real’ people.

In Christie’s case, she began to loathe Hercule Poirot fairly early on. Even though he became psychologically more defined and interesting, she was never truly happy with him. Along with this she copped a lot of speculation that, as a woman, she couldn’t really be the author of such complex crime novels: the word on the street was that “Agatha Christie” was a male writer’s nom-de plume, and that this blowzy woman was merely some kind of marketing gimmick. In desperation, she turned to a new detective, Miss Marple, whose role was to demonstrate that crime – including murder, the most heinous crime of all – could take root in the most benign, bucolic landscapes, and amongst the most unlikely people. Having the crimes solved by a female investigator somehow made the possibility of the story having been written by a woman easier to swallow.

Along with this move, Christie also began to write herself into her novels. At one point we are introduced to Ariadne Oliver, a female writer of detective fiction who works alongside Poirot and Marple at various points. Both physically and mentally, Oliver is a caricature of Agatha Christie, even down to her obsession with apples. Again, this was probably a means of silencing her detractors who couldn’t reconcile the intricacy and precision of her plotting with the large, disorganised woman who claimed to be the author. This move backfired badly on Christie in filmic circles.

When the first Miss Marple movies were made, those doing the casting obviously had trouble finding a means of portraying their main character. Miss Marple is clearly described in the books: she is tall, reserved, and severe. However, the producers were trying to make a light film for a humour-hungry 60s audience. It’s highly likely that someone in the research department found a Christie novel in which Ariadne Oliver appears (probably 1961’s The Pale Horse) and suddenly Margaret Rutherford (1892-1972) as Miss Marple makes sense: Rutherford’s ‘Marple’ is ‘Ariadne Oliver’ dialled wincingly up to 11. No wonder Agatha Christie chose to pretend these movies never happened!

During World War Two, Agatha Christie engaged in war work which took her to London and her experiences there resulted in the writing of Taken at the Flood (1948). At that time, after hours, she also penned two other novels, both of which were finished and then locked away in a bank vault until her death, whereupon instructions in her will led to their being posthumously published. One of these novels was Curtain, the last case of Hercule Poirot; the other was Sleeping Murder, the final adventure of Miss Marple. There is a world of difference between these two books and in order to avoid spoilers, those who’ve not read them should skip the next three paragraphs.

Curtain (1975) signals the end of Poirot’s character arc. It is the novel in which he commits suicide, after being forced to kill a murderer who has managed to perform the impossible – commit a murder for which no evidence exists afterwards to convict him. The setting is Styles, a country estate turned into a rest home, the same place where the first Poirot novel – The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) - is set and in which Poirot is introduced to the world. From all this we can see that Christie had a definite timeline in mind when she set out writing about her Belgian sleuth: there was a time when she thought, like Conan Doyle, to retire her detective to the country; but popular demand would not allow it. And so, she wrote his death and locked it away for later. Poirot was always older than his creator; it was easy for Christie to describe his infirmities and to portray his aging. It was not so easy for her to do likewise with Jane Marple.

Sleeping Murder (1976) is an anomaly. If it is read as the last book in the Marple series, it is instantly shown to be anachronistic. The first Marple stories are homey and countrified, set in sleepy environments which make the horrors which unfold there more dramatic by contrast. As Miss Jane Marple progresses, she becomes more crystallised, no doubt as Christie began to learn how to articulate her inner mechanisms. In a way, Miss Marple was another alter-ego for Christie, just as Ariadne Oliver was, and this shows through in some of the earlier books; it’s not until after the break – when Jane Marple becomes her own entity and Oliver is confirmed as Christie’s avatar – that Jane Marple really comes into her own.

Unfortunately, there’s that final book. In Sleeping Murder, Jane Marple leaps into action: she jumps about, she elaborates intricate plans to trap ne’er-do-wells, she rockets from hiding to accost wrongdoers. All of this bounding about, is the antithesis of who Jane Marple becomes, but it’s exactly what Agatha Christie – writing during wartime - would have done in her shoes. The other elements of the book were all decades out of date by the time it was released in the 70s, so those tracking the spinster sleuth’s career are right to be confused when they hit this volume. Really, it’s something like Nemesis (1971) that is the ‘last Marple novel’, not this one.

(Welcome back spoiler avoiders!)

So, Poirot had a developmental arc for his career from the get-go; Miss Marple’s creation was a slow process of agglomeration, betrayed by her anachronistic “last” episode. Not only does this final novel do a disservice to Miss Marple’s fans it has also – with one exception - derailed the attempts to move Miss Marple to film. It is exactly the depth and complexity which Christie brought to the table that leads people astray.

Jane Marple is a cunning old so-and-so. She knows that people treat her in a certain way because she is what she is – an elderly spinster. People around her expect her to be incapable of action, woolly-headed, imperceptive and gossipy. She trades on this fact, and it’s what makes her so diabolical. However, underneath all of this ‘playing the old dear’, she has a razor-keen mind and a moral compass that brooks no deviation. She’s never surprised by the gruesome crimes which she discovers; only saddened to have her understanding of humanity’s failings routinely underscored. She has no sympathy whatsoever for wrongdoers: in her (chronologically) later books, she refers to herself as the incarnation of the Greek Goddess Nemesis and is ruthless in bringing her foes to justice. She may look like a sweet old thing, but under that facade is a cold and vengeful vigilante.

This is what television and movie producers consistently miss. There have been four major castings of Miss Marple (I’m discounting Japanese anime interpretations, Gracie Fields’ 1956 performance, and also Angela Lansbury’s 1980 role in “The Mirror Crack’d”): Margaret Rutherford from 1961 to 1965; Joan Hickson from 1984 to 1992; Geraldine McEwan from 2004-2007; and Julia McKenzie, from 2008-2013. Rutherford’s performances we’ve already looked at and seen how they’re not actually based upon Miss Marple as depicted in the books, but on Ariadne Oliver. Geraldine McEwan’s interpretation is the next one I’d like to look at:

It’s clear from watching her in these movies that the writers and producers took no notice whatsoever of the development of the Marple character. They made the false assumption that the ‘last book’ would reveal the character at its most developed and they went from there. As we’ve already seen, this is a catastrophic mistake. Far from being fully-formed, the Marple character in Sleeping Murder is still largely in utero and not completed at all. This accounts for all of the leaping and springing about that McEwan does in the role, and all of the cartoon facial tics which she brings to the screen, something that the real Miss Jane Marple would never do.

Moving on to Julia McKenzie (you can see where this is going, can’t you?) the writers and producers make another fatal error. Miss Marple is not a cute, fuzzy little hamster in a woolly cardigan. She may play the sweet old lady when it serves her purpose to do so, but it’s not her real nature. In these shows, the whole crew fall for the big lie and McKenzie plays the fluffy spinster to the hilt, without a suggestion of the core of steel.

That leaves us with the only time that the powers that be got it right. Joan Hickson (1906-1998) was the real deal. For starters, she was tall, as Jane Marple is supposed to be. She radiated intelligence and perception, and she played the character with the reserve and self-deprecation it required. If you watch her in these shows, you can see her turning the sweet old lady demeanour on and off like a tap, which is exactly what Miss Marple does in the books. And she brooks no argument from the bad guys: she sees them go down and she makes sure it sticks. Don’t mess with her. If you’re looking for Miss Marple on DVD, it will reward you to find these releases rather than the others.

As a final note, it’s wise to be aware that the BBC – who have been mostly responsible for the filming of Christie’s books – have a tendency to play fast and loose with the stories. In the earlier Poirot tales starring David Suchet, they messed with the endings and often with the characters, in the foolish belief that those who have read the books might be bored at finding the same old wrap-up as that which happened in the novel. This is a mistake. The filming of Cards on the Table (1936), for example, was a nightmare of Frankensteinian re-engineering involving Superintendant Battle turning gay and was horrendous to watch. The later Suchet stories are better, particularly the latest incarnation of Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

(Obviously, the only person who can play Poirot is David Suchet - no argument. Ustinov was barely passable and Albert Finney was a caricature, not a character, along with everybody else in his version of “Murder on the Orient Express”, with the possible exception of Vanessa Redgrave’s character.)

It might seem a small point to whinge about an actor’s portrayal of a role, even an iconic one such as the character of Miss Jane Marple, but characters are built up from foundations. If the actor can’t grasp the fundamentals of a character, they can’t do the role justice. It’s not enough to affect the comb-over, glower and wear the tight white pants: you can’t be Napoleon if you don’t understand Napoleon. I’m happy if the fundamentals are there – I don’t see why they can’t dye Daniel Craig’s hair and give James Bond black hair just like in the book, but, given the rest of his performance, it’s a small quibble. Suchet gets Poirot. Hickson got Marple. The rest are just actors wearing funny hats.

In the final analysis, do yourself a favour and read the books. Several of Dame Agatha Christie’s books are regarded as among the most important works written in English, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Death on the Nile (1937), Sparkling Cyanide (1945) and A Murder is Announced (1950). How can you possibly go wrong?