A Talent for Murder

Angela Lansbury is the author of more than sixty best-selling mysteries and a lurid past in Paris that includes affairs with Matisse, Picasso, and Doctor Laurence Olivier. Now she's confined to a wheelchair, has a wonky memory, drinks heavily, and is addicted to the Late Late Show. That doesn't stop her grandchildren and their souses from showing up to wish her a happy birthday and discuss how they're going to have her declared insane, ship her to a nursing home, and split up the estate now. But thanks to her ex-con manservant, Tariq Yunis, she has an electronic set-up to deal with the fires she keeps setting from dropping matches in the wastebasket, and for killing people in the garage. So when grand-daughter-in-law Hildegarde Neill is killed that way -- which is also how the murder in her next book is set to go -- there are a lot of suspects.

It's from a stage show co-written by Jerome Chodorov and Norman Panama, and starring Claudette Colbert and Jean-Pierre Aumont. As directed by Alvin Rakoff for television, it's opened up nicely, mainly by editing and moving cameras. I didn't care for how the murder is solved, but it's certainly a pleasure to see Olivier and Miss Lansbury act together.

After all his years of acting this was Laurence Olivier's drama debut for the BBC.

He had done many acting roles for ITV and US television but it seems he somehow proved to be elusive for Auntie Beeb!

Canadian director Alvin Rakoff has previously worked with Olivier before but the star of this adaptation of this stage play whodunnit is Angela Lansbury who plays a famous crime author. A few months before she landed the lead role in Murder She Wrote.

The film is effectively a stage play set in a New York mansion where wheelchair bound crime novelist is devising plots, drinking too much, watching late night bad TV and getting doddery in old age.

Olivier is her personal physician and maybe her one time lover. There is her vulnerable granddaughter (Pamela) who lives with her and there is an Indian housekeeper/driver/electronic expert/ex-con Rashi.

Things take a turn when Lansbury's son, daughter in law and Pamela's seemingly estranged husband arrive for her birthday party with plans to send Lansbury to a retirement home in Florida.

They then want to carve her estate between them which includes priceless Monet's and Picasso's. Of course during the course of events there are twists and turns, chicanery and murder with Lansbury herself looking vulnerable as old age seems to have caught up with her.

The play only opens up when Olivier flies in from France as he is collected at the airport. Apart from that it is very much staged interiors with the then slightly heavily lit BBC lighting.

Maybe this was a good thing as Olivier was the finest stage actor of his generation and you can see the subtle tics he uses in his nuanced performance. It is not Hamlet but even in his 70s, suffering from ill health he still lights up the screen.

The tour de force is actually Lansbury with a strident New York accent with tales of a promiscuous past with artists and bohemians. A journey that has taken her to become a skilled and successful writer but who now has to deal with a grasping family and a not too trustworthy housekeeper. But is she more wily than she lets on?

There are plenty of suspects and potential red herrings as to the murder. The various offspring's play their parts well although Hildegard Neil looked a little cross eyed though.

Ageing grande-dame rattling around in a great mansion full of memories. And, coincidentally it seems, writing best-selling murder mysteries in the style of Jessica Fletcher, whose immortal detective series was just about to launch on its record-breaking run. Give or take a non-stop diet of brandy and cigarettes, Angela Lansbury could be giving us a preview of Jessica in one of her (regrettably few) 80-minute episodes, which allowed the scriptwriters so much more leeway than the standard 40-minute versions.

As with MSW, the other players are remarkably unremarkable, looking as though they're on loan from summer stock, except Laurence Olivier, on his last legs, but still showing signs of his once-tremendous calibre. He's playing an ex-lover of the Jessica character (Ann), arriving for her birthday-party, also attended by her daughter and son-in-law, who are taking a rather unsavoury interest in the contents of her will.

Ann enjoys pointing out the original Picassos and Matisses on the wall, claiming that these were portraits of herself ("I think Pablo got me spot-on, don't you?"), and firing-off instructions to her longsuffering Indian servant, who keeps delivering pearls of wisdom from the sub-continent, "In Ranjapur, we have a saying...", but is also a convicted burglar, whom Ann is hiding from the law. Madly bohemian, as they say.

We can't reveal much more, except that the plot of Ann's latest book manages to get intermingled with the current real-life events. Equipped with a lot of hi-tech surveillance gear, she succeeds in organising an ingenious little bugging operation with the neatest device I can remember. And a smoke-alarm, triggered by a fag-end in a waste-paper basket, is a running joke that becomes only a little repetitive.

A talent for murder feels as if someone has been too much of a fan of sleuth,that other great detective movie with Olivier, only much better. Right before the commencement of murder she wrote it appears to have been then the great catalyst to one of the best who done it-police soaps ever and in this we can only be grateful like huge on our knees you know; but it seems to be like a practical impossibility to furthermore appreciate this giant movie turd in human history.