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The Mirror Crack’d (1980)
Universal DVD (region 4)
d. Guy Hamilton; pr. Richard Goodwin, John Brabourne; scr. Jonathan Hales, Barry Sandler; novel. Agatha Christie; ph. Christopher Challis; m. John Cameron; ed. Richard Marden; cast. Angela Lansbury, Edward Fox, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, Gerladine Chaplin, Tony Curtis, Kim Novak (105 mins)
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ORIGINAL MOVIE POSTER ART
Angela Lansbury makes Agatha Christie's Miss Marple Her Own
Following the success of the screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express in the mid 1970s there followed a cycle of movie ventures featuring several of the author’s characters.
The Belgian super sleuth Hercule Poirot thus returned firstly for the 1978 sequel Death on the Nile and subsequently for other movies throughout the 1980s. Although Poirot dominated these Christie adaptations, the cycle briefly turned to another of the author’s popular character for one film. Thus, The Mirror Crack’d featured Angela Lansbury in the role of Miss Marple, Christie’s beloved amateur sleuth with an intuitive insight into human nature. Miss Marple, an elderly spinster in a country village who fills in where the baffled local police cannot, first appeared in a 1930 novel and would recur until as late as the late 1970s, in 12 books and several short stories. However, unlike Poirot, there were already numerous film and television incarnations of the character: Gracie Fields played her on TV in 1956 and then Margaret Rutherford starred in a series of films from 1962 to 1964. After 1980’s The Mirror Crack’d, Miss Marple returned to the small screen for a number of telemovies starring Joan Hickson as the movie was seemingly passed over. Indeed, arguably thus, Angela Lansbury’s version remains an aberration, perhaps best considered as a forerunner to her more widely known work in TV’s Murder She Wrote.
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Synopsis (contains spoilers)
HOLLYWOOD SCREEN VETERANS
KIM NOVAK & ELIZABETH TAYLOR
The Mirror Crack’d concerns a murder mystery set in a rural England community wherein an abrasive American film crew has invaded the English manors and countryside to make an historical drama.
The locals are in awe of the big Hollywood star there (Elizabeth Taylor) although such fandom quickly becomes suspect. At a party, a guest is poisoned with a drink apparently intended for Taylor, and her husband (Rock Hudson) soon tries to shield her from the ongoing case. However, a detective from Scotland Yard (Edward Fox) soon comes in to investigate: he just happens to be a relative of Miss Marple and regularly fills her in on the details of the ongoing investigation. Lansbury though, has ideas of her own, as there are (as usual for the Christie formula) a myriad of potential suspects, many with a convincing motive for wanting to kill Taylor. In true Hollywood fashion, the show must go on and the production goes ahead even when there may be a second murder attempt underway. Soon Lansbury feels it is up to her to remedy the situation. Like the previous Death on the Nile but planted firmly in the English countryside, the formula plot hook of guest big-name stars assembled in the one location where a murder takes place is strictly adhered to, although this film lacks the sense of tense confinement offered in both the previous Poirot films and feels much more forced in comparison.
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Resenting the Hollywood-ization of British Film Culture
The film begins on an amusingly self-reflexive note, with a group of villagers gathered to watch a mystery movie. The projector breaks down and they are at a loss to who the screen killer is until Miss Marple duly fills them in.
Indeed, this clever note of self-reflexivity hints at the film’s real agenda and slyly continues through the remainder of the film as director Guy Hamilton constantly stresses the ironic presence of the Hollywood storytelling machine in rural England. It is as if Hamilton truly resents such an intrusive American presence and sets out to quietly mock it as he exposes the eventual horror and psychological grotesquery that he considers emblematic of Hollywood. Thus, much of the film and its humour revolve around the clash of cultures and the dotty eccentricity of the locals who hold these fallen Hollywood stars as somehow greater than life. Significantly, it is Lansbury who fails to be impressed by these people, only getting involved at a later stage and deducing the case not by firsthand investigation but by the details relayed to her by detective Fox. However, too much of the film is spent in the broad, caricaturish attempt to ridicule Hollywood: to the point where it flounders in overacting by the American performers even if the difference in acting styles between the English and the Americans does strengthen the culture clash. For Hamilton, America and England are well served by the distance between them.
Ultimately, its quaint kooks and bitchy eccentrics can only carry this film so far before its clash of attitudes and customs becomes dreadfully mannered.
MOVIEMAKING SELF-REFLEXIVITY:
THE USA vs THE UK
As a depiction of American vanities run wild it may have an amusing attraction but its comedic aspects will satisfy only those who hold America and American film in broad contempt. As such, its satire is mostly a rather scathing crassness. For director Hamilton, Miss Marple represents the good English Dame needed to restore order to the increasing, petty disorder brought by an awful American psychosis. Hamilton desperately seeks to explore the theme of the deeper psychological disarray that lies behind the facade of American glamour and how if left unchecked it will contaminate the English. American arrogance and indifference is summed up in Hudson’s suggestion that they have a film to make and cannot be held back by such an insignificant thing as the murder of an English villager. In this sense, Fox’s character is a needed bridge because he is familiar with American culture and able to mediate its effects and hence shuffle through characters seemingly forever on the edge of a breakdown. Into this, the effort to introduce a note of pathos into Taylor’s character seems hollow, and the film never gels fully in its intended tonal balance. Finally, the film is most interesting as the work of an English director returning “home” after flirting with American film form.
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Garish Americans Loose in the British Countryside
The visual transfer in anamorphically enhanced widescreen is functional enough without ever being spectacular or gripping.
DVD COVER ART SAMPLE
It is full of the colours of the English countryside and is perfectly at home with the varied details of village life and its customs, at its best with these in an opening village fete sequence. However, it is equally adept at contrasting interiors and exteriors and at exploring the differences between the vast manor spaces and the cosier cottage dwellings, replete with their associated suggestions of the British class system. There are lush greens in evidence in this gardener’s paradise of a location, but beyond that there is never really any vibrant visual presence – it is at once subdued and glossy, though with a well-sustained sense of the comparative brightness within the countryside. This fondness for “quaintness” actually carries through as an intended statement. Thus, more insidiously, it does capture the garish manner in which American colour and activity disrupts the locals and sweeps them away, overwhelming the gentle, demure and quaint with the loud, grotesque and overbearing. Hence, the Americans’ costumes are more extravagant than the more reality-based British and the film holds the elegant veneer of traditional British garb again in contrast to the vulgar American presence. This sly but often forced methodology dominates the film’s visual design above anything else.
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Accents and the Intrusion into Gentility
The sound transfer is available in an equally functional Dolby Digital mono without much apparent adornment to, or enhancement of, the original materials.
The centred voices barely manage much of a presence and that aspect of the transfer feels particularly flat and routine throughout: reaching the point where mono risks becoming monotonous. Natural sounds are minor and the elegant score sometimes competes for attention amidst this flatness of affect. Despite these shortcomings in the transfer (and in the design), a dominant aural motif is still evident in the clash between American and English accents, another nice way of hammering home the film’s central England versus Hollywood’s America theme. Interestingly, Geraldine Chaplin’s character as a liaison between the English and the Americans is encapsulated both in her knowing casting and in her accent, a variable hybrid of the two extremes. For Hamilton it is almost a sick, sad joke as his intentionally scathing view of Americans is indeed barely restrainable, giving the film whatever individuality it has. Correspondingly, the film renders the American accents as vulgar intrusions into English gentility: the coarse and only crudely glamorous versus the refined, decent and gently cultured. Although there are pleasures to this constant contrast of accents, the transfer and overall sound design here lacks enough distinction to enhance this device.
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