The underlying problem with this version of Murder at the Vicarage is that the producers took it out of order. Murder at the Vicarage was Agatha's Christie's first adventure with Miss Marple. This edition was evidently produced later in the series. Here, Miss Marple is used to being involved, and police are used to consulting her, however much they resent having to do so. The script is rather heavy-handed, moving quickly from one incident to another with little or no set-up. And while the original novel does this as well, it doesn't spring things on us totally out of the blue. Joan Hickson is most probably the Miss Marple that Agatha Christie envisioned - more so than Margaret Rutherford or Helen Hayes, for example, but the rest of the production is not. True, a 200+ page novel had to be condensed into one hour and 42 minutes. This is never easy, but it has often been done successfully. Not here. The writers needed to capture the leisurely and still foreboding small village atmosphere early on. They didn't, and it makes the necessarily hurried plot revelations seem even more so. This results in far too many smug reaction shots, far too many exchanges of dialogue dripping with "significance", far too many scenes which could have been cut to a few lines of dialogue, freeing up the pace for more insightful exchanges elsewhere. (For example, the secondary priest subplot is reduced to an obligatory afterthought here. It was more prominent in the novel, but its lack of necessity here is obvious. The bit with the vicar's car is also totally unneeded; he rides his bicycle the rest of the time, anyway.) Overall, Miss Marple is reduced to an almost supporting player, which of course she is in many of the Christie novels, but one whose presence is always felt whether she is on scene or not. That isn't true here, at least until the end, and it should be.
Miss Marple: The Murder at the Vicarage
(1986 TV Movie)
An lightweight take on Miss Marple
21 September 2018