The first 20-30 minutes of "The Murder At The Vicarage" are quite poorly done: a collection of random characters are seen walking and talking without having been properly introduced to the viewer, which, coupled with some heavy accents, makes the story difficult to follow for anyone who has not read the book. The lack of any familiar faces in the cast does not help, either; several of the women are so similar in appearance it's sometimes hard to even distinguish who is who. And there are important characters (like Lawrence Redding, for example) who get no more than 3 or 4 scenes in the entire film. The direction is uninspired, to put it kindly. Things improve a little in the last 20 minutes, when Miss Marple devises a trap for the killer, but on the whole this is definitely one of the weakest Agatha Christie films I have seen so far (though the recent French "By The Pricking Of My Thumbs" remains the worst). (*1/2)
