Miss Marple: Le manoir de l'illusion

Miss Marple visits old friends. Ruth van Rydock and her sister Carrie-Louise Serrocold. Ruth is worried about her sister' health.

Carrie-Louise is married to Lewis Serrocold who uses part of the estate as an institute for young offenders. Christian Gulbranson is an trustee who arrives for some urgent business and who is later found dead.

Joan Hickson is excellent as Miss Marple. However this is not one of the better BBC adaptations and I can understand why they held it back.

It takes a while for the murder to happen, until then we are introduced to all sorts of odd characters such as a young man who thinks he is the son of Winston Churchill. Two brothers who inexplicably flirt with a married woman.

It all seemed too padded. There should be more tension as there should had been an assortment of suspects. After all it is set in an institution where young men have criminal records or mental health problems. However the reveal was rushed and did not exactly make sense. I think this could had been done and dusted in a hour.

Look out for a young Jake Wood as one of the reform school boys.

Although I really liked this, it is a disappointment after the delightful Murder Is Announced. Then again the book isn't Agatha Christie's best, although it's well written and perplexing, it is for me one of the weaker Marple books. There were several things I liked about the adaptation, one was the acting. Joan Hickson is a sheer delight as Miss Marple, and Faith Brook and Jean Simmons were very effective as Carrie-Louise and Ruth. Their end scene in particular was very poignant. Joss Ackland has a little less to do, but he turned in a solid performance. The adaptation is beautifully photographed, and the music is stunning. However, I had a real problem with the pace, the adaptation does start off very slowly, and never quite recovers. Out of the Joan Hickson adaptations, it is one of the least faithful ones. The elements that made the book perplexing were either left out or a tad underdeveloped. Consequently the plot is hard to follow and I will admit the final solution left me baffled. Overall, disappointing but well acted and beautifully filmed, so worth a look. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Despite thinking that I had seen the vast majority of the BBC Marple films, my second random one in as many days turned out to be yet another one I had never seen before. Sleeping Murder had been the first and had been surprising accessible and lively and the opening of Mirrors made me think it would be more of the same, with the American voices and the tone of the opening scenes. I was also familiar with the story as I had seen the ITV Marple films adapt it as well. Sadly They Do It with Mirrors turned out to be a real summary of what I tend to dislike about the Marple series.

Running long (particularly with adverts lasting 4 minutes every 10-15 minutes) the film really takes its time with everything but not in a way that hooks me. Ironically I felt that Sleeping Murder was almost too accessible and easy to follow, but yet at the same time I appreciated it for this. They Do it with Mirrors goes the other direction by quite some measure as it does almost nothing to assist the viewer in keeping up with Marple or indeed even CI Slack. Instead of clues or red-herrings what we are given are characters and details – but none of which really are much used until we enter that final room for the traditional reveal. Like tedg said in his review, the viewer here is never allowed to be taken along with the case – we are sitting in the final room with the rest of them, knowing who people are but learning stuff we didn't know before and couldn't have figured out.

The problem I have with this is that I feel excluded and just expected to wait rather than be involved in the mystery. The longer this goes on the less inclined I was to care and by the end I was really not paying much attention to it. There never appears to be much in the delivery to intrigue the viewer or make them think – I watched this knowing the story but yet still didn't really know where it was going and while I'm open to the idea of me being dumb, I think part of it was that the film wasn't actually going anywhere until it got to the final reveal. I'd like to say the pieces all fell into place at this point, but they don't because we hadn't been given pieces – only characters, no clues, no nuggets etc. The cast are solid throughout despite this; I do like Hickson as Marple and enjoy her way of playing it as all observation and gossip – the downside is that she does live in her head as a character so she needs the script to help her in terms of what the viewer can "see", she gets no such help with this one.

I'm not sure if it is deliberate or by design but this film was incredibly uninvolving – it offered me nothing throughout and then suddenly pulls the solution out of nowhere. It is difficult to care and before the reveal scene I had really stopped being interested since the film itself seemed so uninterested in me.

This version tries to bring Christie's story accurately, but the editing is so choppy the details of plot are often hard to follow. Not to worry, though, intuitively if not deductively, you'll spot the murderer without much trouble. Good cast, especially Jean Simmons, and great scenery make it a pleasant watch. Joan Hickman, though, as Miss Marple just didn't quite cut it for me.

Miss Marple visits an old friend, Ruth van Rydock, on a large country estate. Ruth lives there with some relatives and an assortment of characters. When someone is murdered, Miss Marple starts investigating, as does her old sparring partner, Detective Chief Inspector Slack.

The weakest episode of the Miss Marple series. Quite unengaging: the characters aren't particularly likeable or well-developed and, despite the cast, the performances largely seem over-acted. The plot is drawn out in the extreme: the murder doesn't happen until about the half-way mark and even after that things just crawl along.

After all this when the murderer is revealed it all seems random and far-fetched, complete with trite ending.

There is still a fair degree of intrigue and this keeps it going and makes it watchable, but only just.