The Crooked House
Director:
Year: 2017
Rating: 6.5
With my flu hanging on like a recurring bad dream, I continued my Agatha
Christie viewings of some recent adaptations of her books. She is the authoress
who will not go gently into the night. There were so many other mystery writers
who were contemporaries of her and who wrote some fine crime novels but you
rarely will come across new adaptations of their books any more - but Christie
novels keep getting updated for a new generation.
Crooked House is another standalone novel written in 1949 - which is interestingly
five years before another book that was later made into a famous film in
1956 was written - but I can't name the book or movie as it would give away
too much. But just interesting to note. This film is not part of the BBC
Christie film series - and lacks the imaginative style of those films. It
is very standard and straight forward in its plotting and characterization
following the book very closely. It also had a theatrical release though
a very abbreviated one. I suppose it deserved that just because of a few
of the high profile names in the cast - Glenn Close playing a grandmother
(how time has flown), Gillian Anderson as a middle aged bitter wife (ditto),
Julian Sands and Terence Stamp as a Chief Inspector.
For Christie this sort of novel was her golden fleece - a murder takes place
in the enormous manor of a wealthy businessman and his entire extended family
is living there, all have motive, all have means and no alibis and most of
them are rather venal. As much as Christie loved writing about the rich and
their life styles, more often than not they do not come off very well. I
think she understood her readers - they loved sniffing around the wealthy
but were happy to see some of them killed off. The mystery itself is pretty
good - I didn't figure it out much before the detective - but it never gets
particularly involving or tense. Much too polite.