Charles Laughton is brilliant as the grumpy, brilliant lawyer who, agains the advice of his nurse (Elsa Lanchester, Mrs Laughton in real life), takes on the case and does better than he thought possible. Of course, if youre looking for the first film adaptation to feature Christies famous Miss Marple, then check out this movie about. Marlene Dietrich, who appeared in only a handful of movies after this smash, is wonderfully forceful as the wife of a man apparently bang to rights for murder. But the film is still a delightful masterclass of character acting. Would I still fall for it now? Probably not. It was, however, probably just outside, at number six. We did not include Billy Wilder’s great film on our recent list of the five best ever movie twists. Our own Barry Fitzgerald plays Judge Francis J. Look to John Carpenter’s The Thing for one later variation. And me must thank Dame Agatha herself for one of the great solutions in mystery literature.īased on a novel whose original title (also once UK title of this film) we now hesitate to even reference, Rene Clair’s terrifically atmospheric film revels in a stock plot that never gets old: a group of strangers vanish one by one while stranded on a remote island. Delicious score from Richard Rodney Bennett. Gorgeous, soft-focus camerawork from Geoffrey Unsworth. Sydney Lumet’s film is one of the great mainstream entertainments of its era. The first one was, of course, based on 4.50 From Paddington. The Rutherford Marple films are delightful bank holiday fun. She is one of my very favourite actresses. Just check out this whacky interrogation.Ĭhristie purists will stress that Margaret Rutherford is not nearly insidious enough for Miss Marple. Rarely seen on telly, but well worth unearthing. However, that phrase has been used frequently in the movies and was even mistakenly cited in Bartletts Familiar Quotations. Frank Tashlin’s take on The ABC Murders has the class of populist strangeness we expect from that original director. Yes, the great Tony Randall did play a version of Hercule Poirot. The youngest of three siblings, she was home-schooled by her mother, who encouraged her daughter to write.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on Septemin Torquay, Devon, in the southwest of England. But first, a little history of this fabulous English writer.
There are, nonetheless, a handful of cracking films. Today we present you 8 books by Agatha Christie in PDF format that you can read and download for free.
While Hitchcock attacked Highsmith and Almodovar adapted Rendell, Christie adaptations remained largely a TV thing. Whereas the more astringent Patricia Highsmith is worshipped as an awkward saint, Agatha remains a pleasure we are expected to enjoy in guilty gloom. Later mystery writers such as Ruth Rendell and P D James gained a degree of recognition in the citadel, but Christie was always seen as too darn twee. In another sense, she remains far from respectable. The lower-class cad may have walloped Reverend Drainpipe to death, but that wouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of afternoon tea.
Despite devoting herself to murder, Dame Agatha delivered the very definition of the “comfort read”. Four upcoming films will mark the end of Agatha Christie's Poirot, and see David Suchet reprise his role as the world famous Belgian detective for the very l. When holidaying in the Norfolk Broads (or wherever) during the mid-1970s you could always expect to happen upon a pile of her novels in the unused box room. So I think I just realized that maybe that’s what this graphic novel allowed me to do, is keep my format, my very strict, strict format of these contained small movies, and yet I could do the biggest version of my movies.In one sense, Agatha Christie, who was born 125 years ago today, could hardly be more respectable. Well, look, I found a graphic novel that allowed me to tell a generational story and still be contained and be in a small movie. “You would think that would rule out a generational story where I can go over many decades and tell a story. “I’ve been making movies this way since The Visit : very contained movies that I fund,” the writer-director explains. Chatting with Den of Geek just ahead of the film’s cinema release, Shyamalan explains that his new priorities when it comes to moviemaking are to focus on contained stories. It’s a fascinating and bleak premise inspired by the graphic novel Sandcastle by Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Lévy, which doesn’t exactly sound like it’s in the mold of the queen of detective fiction, Agatha Christie.īut watching the movie, the similarities start to show through.
Night Shyalaman’s latest, Old, sees a group of families at a luxury resort taken to a special beach which makes them age incredibly rapidly, to the point that their lives play out in entirety over hardly more than a day.