Review: The Mirror Crack’d

An injured Miss Marple (Angela Lansbury) and her Scotland Yard detective nephew Dermot (Edward Fox) investigate a murder in her own local village where a film about Queen Elizabeth is set to be shot. Rock Hudson plays the movie’s director, Elizabeth Taylor and Kim Novak are feuding divas of rapidly advancing age, Tony Curtis plays the slick producer, Geraldine Chaplin plays Hudson’s possibly too-loyal assistant. Look out for a young Pierce Brosnan on the set of the Queen Elizabeth film in a cameo.

 

As with Sherlock Holmes, everyone has their favourite version of Miss Marple. I’m no Agatha Christie purist in the slightest, but for me Dame Margaret Rutherford will always be Miss Marple. You’d think that the future Jessica Fletcher, Angela Lansbury would be a perfect fit for the character. Unfortunately, she’s merely decent and this 1980 flop from veteran Bond director Guy Hamilton (“Goldfinger”, “Diamonds Are Forever”, “Live and Let Die”) is pretty subpar stuff despite an all-star cast. Lansbury is OK and although she apparently dislikes the film, she’s clearly having a jolly good time inhabiting the famed spinster sleuth. Unfortunately, someone obviously thought Lansbury didn’t look old enough in 1980 (she was 55, hardly a spring chicken!) and decided to give her phony white hair. It looks completely wrong on Lansbury, and such a small physical detail somehow manages to take you out of things a bit.

 

However, the real problem here is the script by Jonathan Hales (“Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones”, TV’s “Young Indiana Jones Chronicles”) and Barry Sandler (Ken Russell’s awful, lurid “Crimes of Passion”), principally the mystery at hand sucks the big one. It falls entirely flat because the screenwriters (or Christie herself, I haven’t read the original text) don’t play fair with an audience surely expecting to be playing along with fellow amateur sleuth Miss Marple. Isn’t that always the biggest part of the fun with these things? It’s unfair and frankly rather insulting and smug. It just won’t do. I think part of the problem is that the character of Miss Marple spends about ¾ of the film bailed up with an injury, as nephew and Scotland Yard Detective Dermot Craddock (an excellent Edward Fox, in the film’s best turn) does most of the on-screen sleuthing. So we don’t get to see how Miss Marple came to her final deductions until the big reveal. It’s the kind of thing where you’d swear it was forced by an on-set injury to the star, but in this case I don’t believe Lansbury was legitimately injured.

 

Aside from the aforementioned Fox’s terrific work, there are very fine performances from Rock Hudson (acting like a grumpy Cary Grant, which suits him), Elizabeth Taylor, and a campy but well-cast Tony Curtis. Unfortunately, Kim Novak brings the totally wrong kind of camp in a dreadfully unconvincing, miscast turn that Raquel Welch or Sophia Loren would’ve knocked out of the park. It’s a shame, because it’s obvious that Taylor (who has zero issues convincing as a bitchy diva) and Novak are meant to be going for a Crawford and Davis bitchy movie star feud thing, but Novak acts like it’s her first movie whilst Taylor acts like the role was practically written for her. What a massive fall from Novak’s great work in “Vertigo” to this rather embarrassing misstep. Maybe Novak was just incapable of being funny, I dunno. Geraldine Chaplin has also done far better work than she does here, she’s actually rather distracting. Meanwhile, poor Charles Gray’s services are barely needed here, playing a stock butler role, barely getting a line or two. What a strange decision to cast that role with a recognisable face, I reckon he got more to do providing voice-over work for Jack Hawkins on a few films (Hawkins having lost the power of speech towards the end of his life) than he does here. On the plus side we start off with a funny, B&W movie-within-a-movie bit featuring Allan Cuthbertson and Nigel Stock.

 

Angela Lansbury is in good cheer and makes for an OK Miss Marple, but looks rather goofy with white hair. A mostly good star cast gets saddled with a whodunnit that proves unenjoyable to the audience who want to play along. It ends up surprisingly lousy and frankly rather useless. Who thought anyone was going to be satisfied with Miss Marple acting as a support act in her own damn film?

 

Rating: C

 

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