Mörderische Leidenschaft

Bill Bixby, not actually turning into the Incredible Hulk, tries to solve the deaths of citizens in one of those quaint English villages where murderers seem to thrive. A nice fair adaption of a fun Christie book with pretty Leslie Anne and a hefty Olivia huffing and puffing thru the scenery. She's a wicked gas here.

Agatha Christie's 1939 story has been updated to the Eighties and it's hero/protagonist made an American allowing for the casting of Bill Bixby as Luke Williams, mathematical genius and computer programmer. He takes a fateful ride on a British commuter train and meets up with Helen Hayes who has an important errand to run.

Helen's a talkative old biddy who is worried that there have been a number of strange deaths in her small village recently and she fears that village constable Freddie Jones isn't quite up to a homicide investigation. She's confides in Bixby and then gets run down by a hit and run driver as she leaves the train.

Bixby's mathematical mind can't take in the random probabilities of all this coincidence and it intrigues him. He goes back to Hayes's village and turns detective, annoying village constable Jones, but finding romance with Lesley Anne Down and a host of suspects and a couple more deaths before the mystery is solved.

Among other inhabitants at the village is the local librarian Olivia DeHavilland and Timothy West who owns several newspapers. It's a pity that the story called for Helen Hayes to be killed off immediately so there could be no scenes with DeHavilland and Hayes.

As this story was written in 1939 I suspect that Agatha Christie had Lord Beaverbrook in mind for Timothy West's character. Audiences in 1982, especially American ones couldn't possibly appreciate the satire that Christie was employing with West as the tyrannical ego-maniacal newspaper publisher. Still I suspect citizens of the United Kingdom of the older generations knew quite well who West's character was modeled on.

I don't think the updating especially hurt the story however. The cast does very well by their roles and it's an intriguing film and idea that Helen Hayes voices.

Pretty good mystery. Lesley-Anne Down has never looked better and Bill Bixby portrays the hapless American well enough. Plot twists abound and the viewer is left with a very satisfying mystery. Agatha Christie would approve!

"Murder is Easy" begins promisingly enough, with the charming Helen Hayes boarding a train to London, where she plans to reveal to the Scotland Yard the identity of a serial killer above suspicion in her quiet little village. Unfortunately, she gets killed about 10 minutes in, and we're stuck with the bland Bill Bixby as our lead for the rest of the movie. Bixby's character acts like an amateur sleuth, but he barely figures out one thing right in the entire movie! With the exception of the lovely Lesley-Anne Down and the dependable veteran Olivia de Havilland, the rest of the cast is forgettable and their characters underdeveloped. The direction is flat. However, there is one very well-done bit towards the end: a confrontation between 2 characters who keep talking to each other suggestively, and the viewer knows that one of them is the killer but NOT which one, and only after the whole thing is over do we find out the truth. Those 5 minutes, and the 10 featuring Helen Hayes, cannot fully compensate for the dullness of the other 80, though. (**)

American adaptations of Agatha Christie (especially for television) tend to be on the low end of the scale. It's principally the writing, secondarily the directing – i.e. the writers and directors mold the Christie work into something they *think* American audiences want instead of giving us what we actually *do* want – which, when it comes to English murder mysteries, is the same thing the English want.

So, I was greatly taken by surprise so see that *this* adaptation of *Murder is Easy* was NOT bad. It is not grade 'A' quality by a long shot; but it is definitely a high 'B' grade. And it is certainly more faithful to the original than the 2008 adaptation (which has a lot of *very* bizarre flights of fancy that do NOT make for a better story; just a bizarre one).

In this version, Luke is not a retired policeman from India but a computer expert from America; but the age difference is the same (or at least Bixby was 20 years older than Down, which is the age difference in the novel). Lavinia Pinkerton has become Lavinia Fullerton for some reason, but she's killed the same way under either surname. Gordon Ragg, Lord Whitfield (no known relation to June) has become Lord Easterfield (in full credit, Lord Gordon Easterfield; but Easterfield would be his lordship, not his surname - so he might still be a Ragg, at least by birth). Honoria Waynflete, Rose Humbleby, and the rest (so far as I can tell) are all the same.

The plot develops steadily and cleanly, as the suspense slowly builds. As in the novel, Luke believes the killer is a certain individual – which, of course, is a classic signal to reader and viewer that it must be someone else; but who? Ah, therein lies the mystery – and when the identity of the killer is finally revealed, it *is* a surprise (unless, of course, you have already read the book) because it is somebody whom nobody would suspect.

And as long as nobody suspects you ... Murder is Easy.

Side Note for Radio Fans: The best adaptation of this novel to date (November 2016) is one that was done a few years ago for BBC Radio 4 by Joy Wilkinson. It stars Patrick Baladi (New Tricks, Poirot), Lydia Leonard (The 39 Steps - 2008 version), Michael Cochrane (Downton Abbey), Marcia Warren (Agatha Raisin, Dangerfield), and a lot of other very good British actors that most Americans will not have heard of.