Miss Marple: They Do It with Mirrors

Miss Marple answers a call to go the aid of her old friend Carrie Louise, who's life is seemingly under threat.

I truly love Joan Hickson's adaptations of Miss Marple; she is, in my opinion, the quintessential Jane Marple. This one however, is one of my lesser favorites in the series. I'll try to explain why.

The novel itself isn't one of my favorites; I find the trickery of the murder works better in the book (in my mind) than it does on screen. In terms of production, I find it safe but still very good; when compared to other adaptations, it's quite not there.

On the plus side, the acting is superb; Hickson is, as always, excellent, and Holly Aird is wonderfully youthful and vibrant as Gina. The legendary Jean Simmons is incredibly sweet; she gave a sensitive and believable performance of the fragile Carrie Louise. I am a bit biased when it comes to Joss Ackland; he is hugely charismatic, at times almost overpoweringly so, but here we see a restrained, dare I say, touching performance; his voice makes him incredibly watchable.

The scene I enjoyed most of all, I think, was the stage play. Ruth looks on awkwardly, but Marple watches intently. It's there to show that events are sometimes smoke and mirrors, it's very cleverly put together. I also like their later fireside chat where she talks about the robberies committed by starting the bonfires early.

I would still call it a very good adaptation, it's just that I have such high regards for others in the series. I must say I find ITV's later Marple adaptation to be particularly good, a series people often moan about.

8/10.

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.

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.

Christie gets in some well aimed digs at fashions in philanthropy and lets reformatory boss Lewis Serocold spout on about the need to trust young offenders and betray a creepy symbiosis with one of the delinquents who should clearly be in a cosy asylum somewhere.

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.