Guest Post & #Giveaway: Agatha Christie, She Watched (At the Movies With Teresa #1) by Teresa Peschel
- Archaeolibrarian
- 13 hours ago
- 17 min read
Book Details:
Genre: Movie & Video Reference, Movie & Video Guides & Reviews, Non-Fiction
Published by: Peschel Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2023
Number of Pages: 436 pages, Paperback
ISBN: 9781950347391 (ISBN10: 1950347397)
@PeschelPress @partnersincrimevbt
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Care to match wits with Hercule Poirot? Share tea and gossip with Miss Marple? Chase spies with Tommy and Tuppence?
“Agatha Christie, She Watched” will introduce you to must-see movies (and must-avoid dogs) that prove Agatha’s genius depicting the hopeful and dark sides of human nature. These movies will tantalize you, mystify you, and make you laugh at the folly of humanity.
For more than a century, Agatha Christie has thrilled readers with her classic mysteries and dark dramas that explore evil such as “And Then There Were None” and “Endless Night.” with more than 200 adaptations made from her stories, Agatha has been a huge part of the world’s movie and television culture.
Teresa Peschel watched and reviewed 201 adaptations, from the German silent movie “Adventures, Inc.” (1929) to “See How They Run” and “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” (2022). Each was rated for fidelity to the original material and its overall quality. Each review takes up two pages and comes with six cast photos, and a list of the major actors, and the known film locations. Foreign movies with English subtitles from India, France, Russia, China, Japan, and Germany are also reviewed.
Finally, there are eight movies in which the fictional Agatha Christie solves murder mysteries, debate Hercule Poirot about killing him in “Curtain,” battle a space wasp with Doctor Who, and plot to kill her husband’s mistress.
“Agatha Christie, She Watched” is the only comprehensive collection of reviews about Agatha Christie adaptations. Use it to find the movies made from the novels and stories you love, fill in your movie collection, or hold an Agatha Christie festival of your own. Learn why Christie’s stories of passion and pain still grip the imaginations of her readers.
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I’ve always been a fan of Agatha Christie, but not an obsessive one. I didn’t read and reread the novels. I didn’t go looking for obscure short stories. I didn’t read (and still haven’t) her Mary Westmacott novels. I treated her like most people did: She wrote good mysteries, and if they were handy, I read them.
Then Bill began the Complete, Annotated project by publishing Dorothy L. Sayers’ Whose Body?, followed by Agatha’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Over the years, as he annotated the next five of Agatha’s early novels, I read them carefully for possible footnotes. As I did, I paid more attention to her writing, her deft plotting, her sly sense of humor, and her ability to describe a character with a few sentences.
As I became more familiar with her novels, I realized that she’s underrated, probably because she was categorized as a genre writer. Some even consider her works cozies. Clearly, they never read Appointment with Death (1938), And Then There Were None (1939), or Endless Night (1967). I suspect that her Mary Westmacotts — which are described as romances — are anything but.
The publishing world applies labels to make it easier for bookshops to shelve their books in the store, not because they’re accurate.
In July 2020, as the world began opening up from the Covid-19 shutdowns, I was at the library, looking for a DVD to borrow. I spotted Crooked House (2017). I liked the novel, so I thought, “Why not?”
Crooked House was the second Agatha Christie film adaptation I had seen. Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017) was the first.
We needed fodder for the website (peschelpress.com) and I’d already been reviewing books, so I wrote a review of Crooked House. This reminded me that Bill was working on an annotated edition of The Secret of Chimneys. Was there a movie version? A review for the book would be nice. There was. It was an episode in a box set from ITV’s Marple.
Oookaaaay.
Having become overly familiar with Chimneys, I knew Agatha wrote it years before Miss Marple was a twinkle in her eye. But we watched it anyway. It was terrible. Bill wrote his review for The Complete, Annotated Secret of Chimneys, and I wrote mine for the website.
Since the library’s Marple DVD set included three more episodes, we watched them and I reviewed them for the website.
That’s when Bill said the fateful words that brought us here: “Let’s watch more Agatha films. You write the reviews. I’ll post them on the website, and we’ll publish them as a book.”
So here we are nearly three years later. We had no idea how big the Agatha project would become or how many films have been made for cinema and TV. Bill and I have watched more than 200 adaptations. This includes all the English-language ones we could find beginning with Adventures, Inc. (a 1929 silent movie), and many of the foreign versions too. For those, we were limited by availability and whether or not they had English subtitles. It’s criminal neglect that some of the finest Agatha Christie film adaptations in the world are from Japan, yet they’re unavailable in the West.
To my knowledge, we are the only people who’ve watched all the films. I’m definitely the only person who’s written and posted reviews for all those forgotten TV shows and kinescopes.
Along the way, I became much, much more familiar with Agatha’s writing as I had to read the novels and short stories to compare them to the films. She was cutting edge from the beginning. She invented what we call The Poirot, the practice of bringing together the suspects, explaining the clues, and fingering the criminal. It was a trope born of necessity, when her first attempt — Poirot testifying at the trial — didn’t fly with her publisher.
She began experimenting with narrative structure in 1924 with The Man in the Brown Suit. That novel has two narrators, one of them unreliable. Brown Suit is also a romantic thriller disguised as a mystery. Read the passage where Anne Beddingfeld administers to a mysterious, half-naked, sexy stranger’s wounds. This scene could be ripped from any romance novel of today (the sweet kind, not the spicy which would include far more detail). As a side note, the 1989 TV movie is very true to the text despite being turned into a contemporary.
Agatha was an innovative writer throughout her career. Her The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) is a mash-up of P. G. Wodehouse and John Buchan thrillers. Partners in Crime (1929) is a loose cycle of 16 short stories starring Tommy and Tuppence. Each short story is also a parody of a famous mystery writer, including herself! And unlike Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Tommy and Tuppence aged in real time, from the young, eager lovers in The Secret Adversary (1922) to retired grandparents in Postern of Fate (1973).
And what’s And Then There Were None (1939), in which 10 characters are dispatched in an entertaining manner for their sins, but a PG-rated slasher flick? As a sign of its influence, the basic plot has been lifted, the serial numbers filed off, and rewritten in dozens more novels and movies. The A.B.C. Murders (1936) is a prototypical serial killer novel.
Agatha’s innovations could fill a book and go a long way to explaining why she’s still read today.
The other reason is more subtle.
Whatever you can say about the quality of the adaptations (like The Secret of Chimneys, bleah), they keep Agatha in the public eye. Never underestimate the importance of TV shows and movies on an author’s reputation. For each person who reads, 100 people go to the movies, and a 1,000 people watch TV. Every time an Agatha Christie film is shown, people who’ve never heard of her learn she exists. Some of them search out her books and discover how good her writing is.
When a writer dies, they can vanish under the constant tsunami of books being written and published daily. Dorothy L. Sayers is a prime example. Sayers wrote at the same time as Agatha. She’s highly regarded and her books are great. But her estate, unlike Agatha’s, shows no interest in licensing her stories and novels for TV or movies. Say the phrase: “Murder at Downton Abbey,” then ask why her literary estate isn’t capitalizing on Lord Peter Wimsey, detective in the peerage and a duke’s brother.
The Agatha Christie estate does not want her writing to suffer that fate, so they license her short stories and novels. Some adaptations are excellent; some are dreadful. For a few, the only commonality between novel and film is the name. Most range in between but all have something to offer, even if it’s only great period clothes, quality acting, or English Country House Porn. Linenfold paneling! Crenelated ceilings! Parquet floors as elaborate as the finest Persian carpet!
Excuse me while I stop and fan myself.
Watching 200+ Agatha adaptations also taught me plenty about filmmaking, pacing, and soundtracks. I can now, sometimes, recognize an actor from another adaptation. I’ve enjoyed seeing how one novel can be interpreted multiple ways, resulting in wildly different films. The Pale Horse (1961) is a good example. The three films (including Miss Marple in one!) are recognizably the same story, yet they’ve nothing to do with each other. The emphasis is different, the characters different, the tone is different.
I’ve watched 13 different Poirots (including an anime version). Seven different Marples (including an anime version). Multiple Tommy and Tuppences. Each actor or actress brings something new to the character.
The foreign films demonstrate how universal she is. She wrote about dysfunctional families, mapped the class divide, noticed the lengths we go to for status and security, and found reasons for murder ranging from money to passion to safety.
Ironically, foreign filmmakers respect Agatha more than she is at home. Appointment with Death (1938) has been filmed three times, but the Japanese version is the only one that captures the novel’s cruelty and horror. The two English language versions fail, one moderately and one spectacularly. Of the four versions of The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side (1962), only the Japanese version gives a voice to Margo Bence, one of Agatha’s most abused secondary characters. The other three versions ignore her because to face Margo Bence’s pain would mean admitting that the film business cares nothing for children unless they can be sold to make money.
We did not watch every single foreign TV episode even when they were readily available. There just wasn’t enough time. The best we could do was see enough to convey the flavor of a given series. If you want to see them, enjoy yourself! They provide very different views of Agatha and can be rewarding.
The novel that’s been adapted the most is And Then There Were None (1939). We saw ten versions, ranging from a blurry kinescope to slick studio productions with an all-star cast, so it merits its own chapter. Some versions hew to the stage play with its radically rewritten ending. Others stick to the novel, nihilism intact. Some combine the stage play and the novel, so Vera Claythorne learns who the puppet master was, begs for her life, and receives rough justice.
One final warning before you go: spoilers abound, so beware! Unlike Agatha, I don’t play fair with my reviews and hide whodunnit. Where I play fair is in telling you what I thought of them. I liked films that critics panned, and I disliked films others loved. I say why. I go down sidetracks. I enjoyed myself and I hope you will too.
So won’t you join me for an Agatha Christie Movie Marathon? You’ve got hundreds of hours of viewing pleasure ahead of you. Just remember to never accept a cup of tea you didn’t make, or take trips to lonely islands (or châteaus, or country houses) with strangers.
How to use this book
The films are organized by the starring detective. Miss Marple comes first, followed by Poirot, and Tommy and Tuppence. Next, a chapter is devoted exclusively to And Then There Were None, followed by the rest of the adaptations, and the final chapter is movies in which Agatha herself is the star.
Each chapter opens with a photo gallery showing the actors and actresses who played her detectives and characters.
There’s also an index, which is more important than it appears.
Seems logical, yes? Except that some adaptations removed Agatha’s chosen detective, turning the novel into a police procedural. When that happens, the movie is not included in the detective’s chapter. It’s included in “The Rest of the Christies”. Many of the foreign adaptations fall into this category.
Other adaptations (cough, ITV’s Marple, cough) insert a detective who didn’t exist in the novel. That’s why many standalone novels appear in the Miss Marple chapter. She’s now the star of The Sittaford Mystery, Murder Is Easy, The Pale Horse, and others. She also appears in a Tommy and Tuppence novel, By the Pricking of My Thumbs. Similarly, Margaret Rutherford snatched two Poirot novels and made them her own, so they appear in the Miss Marple chapter.
The chapters dedicated to And Then There Were None and the movies not part of a detective series are self- evident. “Agatha the Star,” however, deserves an explanation. In addition to her stories, Agatha’s life has become fodder for Hollywood. This includes the dreadful Vanessa Redgrave/Dustin Hoffman biopic Agatha (1979), a documentary that quotes from her and her work, a Doctor Who episode, and three movies that show Agatha’s exciting life investigating mysteries in a parallel universe. It focuses on Agatha, not her writing. Any relationship to Agatha’s real life should be considered coincidental. Even the documentary in this chapter is not entirely reliable.
Within each chapter, the films are organized chronologically. As you move forward in time, you’ll see changes in how a character was depicted and movie-making styles. Adventures, Inc. (1929) sets the stage. It’s the earliest Agatha film and the scriptwriter, Jane Bess, played fast and loose with the text. She led the way for hack screenwriters everywhere to rewrite Agatha’s prose.
Each review gets two pages. We chose a banner image and six photos of important cast members. I rate films by fidelity to text (or life in “Agatha the Star,” and either the play or the novel in And Then There Were None) and by the quality of the movie overall. The two ratings are separate, but they complement each other and give you a clearer understanding of what to expect.
The cast lists place detectives and police at the top. Everyone else follows in rough order of importance. We group families together to make it easier to work out relationships. Our cast lists are not comprehensive but the main characters are there.
Also note that for those foreign films which don’t name their characters from the novel, we provide that information. This was omitted when they rewrote them so much (such as Unknown (1965), the Indian version of And Then There Were None) that it would not be helpful.
At the end of the list come the film locations, or (in a couple episodes) a song list. Internet Movie Database and Agatha Christie Wiki provided most of the locations, but Bill added to that from other sources (see the bibliography). Knowing the film locations means you, dear reader, can visit the same castle as Poirot or Miss Marple.
Subtitles matter to me. We always looked for versions with subtitles as so many actors mumble or the sound quality is bad. If I can’t understand the dialog, I miss important points. Not every DVD was released with subtitles.
Fortunately, some of the older films like the Joan Hickson Miss Marples are being cleaned up for streaming. They get subtitles. But they aren’t being released as new DVDs so, no subtitles. If you can watch a streamed version, no problem. If you must use your TV and DVD player, you’re out of luck.
We had to have subtitles for the foreign films. We couldn’t see some films we wanted to (we especially regret passing up the Japanese Murder on the Orient Express) because they either weren’t available with subtitles or they weren’t available at all.
The index will help you find a specific film. This isn’t just because some novels got Miss Marple inserted, putting them into the Miss Marple chapter. Agatha’s novels were often released under different names. For example, the novel Lord Edgware Dies (1933) was released in the U.S. as Thirteen At Dinner. It’s been filmed three times, twice as Lord Edgware Dies and once as Thirteen At Dinner. But they’re all based on the same novel and the index connects them.
I list all the names, with a note as to which film it applies to. Or, as with Margaret Rutherford, the film’s name doesn’t correspond to any edition of the novel but I tell you what to look for.
The bibliography provides further reading and shows where some of my information came from.
Enjoy the book. We enjoyed watching the movies, podcasting about many of them, and writing the reviews. We want it to be used, encouraging you to watch Agatha Christie on the screen, always different but always her.
How the movies are rated
Each movie is given two ratings. Fidelity of text is exactly what it sounds. How close is the film to the original text? Sometimes, only the names match. Other films are so faithful, they’re lifeless.
Quality of movie is about the movie itself. Did everything together work as a film? Often, a very good movie isn’t faithful to the text at all (see Miss Marple in Ordeal By Innocence (2007)). If something jars about the movie, I’ll indicate it here.
The rating icons demonstrate Agatha’s many, many ways of killing. Blunt objects, poisoned cocktails, garrotes, knives, guns, stranglers, being pushed down a flight of stairs. They usually reflect the first murder in the film.
A few films, such as And Then There Were None, get five different symbols to reflect all the ways those nasty people got iced.
How to find the movies
We watched the vast majority of the films on DVD on our TV set, the one our neighbors were throwing away. You’re correct that we count our pennies.
That’s why we use our public library. If yours is like ours, it contains a surprisingly large collection of Agatha Christie films. All you have to do is get a library card to borrow them.
You may, like us, have access to more than one library. It’s worth learning what’s available in your area. We belong to our local library (the Hershey Public Library) and to our county library (the much larger Dauphin County Public Library). They often carry different titles so I always check both before moving on to the next step.
Your library is bigger than your municipality, your county, or even your state. Ask for the interlibrary loan librarian. For us, it’s Denise Philips. Denise got us all kinds of DVDs from libraries across the country. This service is usually free, as libraries are tax-supported. Ask and you may be very pleased. The interlibrary loan may take a few weeks for the requested movie to arrive, but it nearly always will.
If Denise could not get us a title, Bill would search eBay and Amazon. We bought a universal DVD player so we could play DVDs from Europe.
There were obscure kinescopes that were on YouTube, so we watched them on the computer.
There are streaming services, including Amazon which gave us access to Britbox. Dailymotion let us watch the Japanese films.
We don’t recommend skeevy pirate sites. They’re illegal, don’t pay royalties to the creators, and whatever you get will be loaded with viruses and malware and the film may be incomplete or damaged.
From the German silent movie Adventures, Inc. (1929) to Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (2022), she covers all of your favourites (including the One True Poirot) and some you may never have heard of! The level of detail and vast array of images is incredible. — Labours of Hercule podcast
The rating systems for Agatha Christie, She Watched
When I began writing reviews for Agatha Christie films and Bill edited them (his name isn’t on the book but the books wouldn’t have happened without him), I had to rate the films. That meant I had to not just watch a film, I had to understand how it succeeded or failed. I had to learn that films are a very different medium from text and that what works in a film doesn’t work in a book and vice versa. It didn’t take long to realize that every film had to be judged two ways: fidelity to text and quality of movie on its own.
Those rankings must be separate because books aren’t movies!
A film can be utterly faithful to the novel and yet drag because every scene, no matter how minor, is dutifully acted by the cast. The Secret Adversary (1983) fits this category. The film lacks the sparkle and fizz of Tommy & Tuppence’s adventures. Yet Poirot’s Failure (2002), the Russian adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (published in 1926) is utterly faithful to its source but it’s never boring. Four hours and twenty minutes long, it covers virtually every scene from the novel. It’s so faithful that if you watch it on YouTube, without English subtitles, and you’re familiar with the novel, you can follow along while the cast emotes in Russian. What is the difference? Casting and direction.
That’s why you, dear movie viewer, need both ratings from me.
Similarly, a novel can endure radical rewriting yet work beautifully as a film and succeed as a valid interpretation of the novel. There are two versions of Ordeal by Innocence (published in 1958) that fit this narrow category. In 2007, ITV inserted Miss Marple into this non-Marple novel. Yet it works. Miss Marple arrives on the island as Gwenda (whose character changes radically between the four versions we’ve seen) prepares to marry Leo Argyle. Then, tragedy strikes and the family she thought welcomed her, turns on her. Gwenda’s murder (also not in the book) proves her innocence and Miss Marple avenges her.
In 2018, Sarah Phelps rewrote Ordeal by Innocence even more radically, including changing the identity of the murderer! Yet that film also works beautifully as a mystery film and as a meditation on innocence, family ties, and the lies we tell ourselves to avoid facing harsh reality.
This is not to say that Agatha would have appreciated either version like I do. She would not have. She preferred fidelity to text. This is largely due to the terrible films she endured seeing during her life. Wholesale changes to her stories resulted, in most cases, in films ranging from not-what-she-wrote to horrible. The films she approved of followed her text.
When Bill laid out Agatha Christie, She Watched, he set up my ratings in a box of their own, highlighting their importance. This led to the next question. What kind of symbol should we use? Everyone uses stars but I didn’t want to do what everyone else does. Stars didn’t feel interesting for a book that I wrote so each review could be read as an essay about an Agatha Christie film and not merely a review. I pack a lot into those 1100 words about the film, the novel, the circumstances behind the film, the locations, and anything else I found interesting.
So, what could replace stars? How about weapons? Agatha killed people using widely varied methods in her novels. We started with the basics. A handgun. A poison bottle. A knife. Fortunately, Deposit Photo had numerous weapon icons we could use. But Agatha got creative and so we needed to get creative. Did Agatha run over a victim with a Rolls Royce? She did indeed! When Agatha poisoned a victim, did the murderer dispense a few drops from the poison bottle? Not always! You can expect your poison in chocolates, teacups, beer steins, and champagne glasses. So we needed all those icons. As we watched more films, we got more creative. Hands for stranglers, garrotes, nooses, cats (yes, a victim is killed by a cat), flying saucers (yes, a victim is thrown out of a flying saucer), Egyptian curses, snowflakes for freezing to death, and on and on. It was fun! And, since not all the films revolve around murder, we needed damsels in distress, gigolos, thieves, physics, and so forth.
My rating system makes my books more fun and gives you a clue to the mystery.
Teresa Peschel never planned to become a writer, nor did she plan to become an expert on film versions of Agatha Christie stories. Then, as a supportive wife, Teresa read and edited Bill’s annotations to Agatha’s first six novels. A desire to promote the books led to writing movie reviews for the Peschel Press website, which led to Bill suggesting they could publish a collection quickly. Two and a half years later, Agatha Christie, She Watched was born. This book got Teresa — and Bill as her supportive husband — an invitation to speak at the 2024 Agatha Christie festival in England.
Like Agatha Christie, Teresa reinvented herself and because of Agatha Christie, she’s become a better writer.
Catch Up With Teresa Peschel:
Tour hosted by: Partners in Crime Tours
Hahaha! This was great! Thanks for sharing this fun guest post.