Film review: Murder, She Said (1961)

We felt like a comfort food film tonight, and this seemed very apposite.  It's the first of the Margaret Rutherford Marple films, and I find that I had her pegged wrong.  For some reason I have her in mind as a wholly unserious Marple, rather jolly and bumbling (in stark contrast to the shrewd Joan Hickson, still the ne plus ultra of Marples, which is why it's a jolt to see the actual Joan Hickson in a small role in this one, 

completely unlike her Marple), but, while she definitely leans to the comedic, she is a genuinely great actress and well capable of conveying hidden depths and serious intent.  

The Marple book of which this is an adaptation is 4:50 from Paddington, which has the killer opening premise of Miss Marple witnessing a murder being committed in a train as it passes alongside her own.  Specifically, the blinds in an apartment pop up momentarily to reveal black-gloved hands throttling a woman to death.  

Of course, when she reports this, first to the guard and then to the police, they are, to say the least, skeptical (the guard notes that she has been dozing and before that she was reading a particularly lurid murder mystery, something for which we later discover she has a taste, as she has a running request at the library (with what passes for a love interest!) to reserve all the new ones that come in - to the outrage of the other old ladies whom he passes over to show favoritism to Marple).  

However, the police take her seriously enough to investigate, even searching alongside the train tracks to find a body, to no avail.  So, Miss Marple, convinced that the body will have been removed before the police search, decides, with the (timorous) help of her librarian beau (Mr. Stringer, played by Rutherford's actual husband, whose actual first name was Stringer) to check out the place where she works out body would have to have been dumped herself (clad in "disguises" of rail-worker outfits (the sight of Rutherford in trousers is quite a jolt)). 

The train track is on top of a steep slope, at the bottom of which Miss Marple finds definite evidence of a body, up against a wall, the other side of which there is currently a very unfriendly gardener and even more unfriendly-looking dog, but also the grounds of a stately home.  But how to investigate said stately home?  Miss Marple gets the idea when Mr. Stringer suggests that the servants might be responsible: she should go undercover as a servant!  There follows an amusing little interlude with a very young Richard Briers, and the main part of the film begins.  

Turns out the family that inhabits the house is, guess what? Eccentric!  They are the Ackenthorpes, heirs to a biscuit fortune, and currently only consisting of the irascible head of the household (played by an actor who must have appeared #1 in the casting book under "irascible," James Robertson Justice (most recently seen by us as the eccentric head of a candy-making dynasty in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)), his sweet but somewhat meek daughter Emma (ably played by an actress with whom I was unfamiliar 

(Muriel Pavlow, whose main claim to fame in my eyes is having Glynis Johns as her maid of honor), and the character who comes closest to stealing the film from Rutherford, the impish young nephew of Emma, son of her dead sister, whose living father (played by Leslie Howard's son Ronald) seems to be showing an interest in her (get in line!), Alexander, 

very well played by Ronnie Raymond (who apparently retired from acting at age 16).  He immediately pegs that there's something fishy about Miss Marple, insists on calling her Jane, and manages, despite being a cheeky little prankster, likeable because of his sheer forthrightness (and recognition that Miss Marple is a cool person to hang around with).  In her turn, while not letting him in on her secret, Miss Marple lets him accompany her on her spying-under-the-cover-of-playing golf, and it is he that discovers a crucial clue: an ornate makeup compact that plays Frere Jacques, found in the old disused stables that Alexander says used to be a great spot to spy on courting village couples until his grouchy grandpa had them chased away.  These stables also contain a mysterious locked room, one that Miss Marple was just about to get into when the scary gardener Hillman, the only person even crankier than Ackenthorpe, who relies on him to manhandle him around when necessary (Ackenthorpe is a perpetual invalid, whose relatives are openly circling, hoping to inherit, which of course is the basis for the plot). Anyway, Miss Marple returns later and finds, concealed in a sarcophagus, the body of the train victim, although she is smart enough to get Stringer to call it in to the police so that later she can truthfully deny that it was her who called the police.  So... whodunnit?  Miss Marple's work has only begun, as she has to wear the silliest of maid's outfits 

as she investigates the suspects, who are largely the aforementioned mooching Ackenthorpe spawn - obnoxious shit-stirring wastrel Cedric, priggish businessman Harold and dreamy, virginal Albert, who is the one to remember that there was a scandal involving a French maid and their brother Edmund who was killed in the war, when it is revealed that the victim was in all likelihood French.  Then it turns out that Emma got a letter from that same maid (Martine) claiming that she had just married Edmund days before his death and was returning to see what she was entitled to just days before the murder.  Talking of Emma, she and Acklethorpe's doctor are in love, and it's the doctor who first points out to the police that the clothes of the corpse look French.  

Anyway, two of the brothers are bumped off in short order, one by poisoning (Miss Marple is outraged that it was her curried duck (ugh) that got arsenicked, although in dosages small enough that everyone else survived, so that brother had to have had a second dose from somewhere, and another by shotgun "suicide" and the inspector (who was come to respect Miss Marple and is obviously her Lestrade) 

becomes worried for her safety, as does Stringer.  And what with the power cuts to which the old house is prone, things are getting hairy.  But Miss Marple thinks she's figured it out - the only thing now is to draw the murderer out, which requires somebody being bait...  Alls well that end's well (although one innocent character's dreams will have taken a dent), and grumpy Ackenthorpe so warms to Miss Marple that he is surprised to find himself proposing (and amazed to find himself rejected).

A fun little number - more like a 40s film, if it weren't for the distinctly (occasionally jarring) 60s soundtrack.  I would certainly have watched a series with Alexander as regular sidekick.  But it was not to be, and eventually undertaking called, showing that actor and character shared the same blase attitude to a corpse.