The Mirror Crack'd (101 minutes)
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Lately, I’ve been on the hunt for comforting television. The Bear was spiking my heart rate, And Just Like That… is lacking in several areas, and reality TV can get grating real quick. Nothing was cutting it for me until my mother gave me access to her Britbox account aka the “the biggest streaming collection of British TV ever.” Be. Still. My. Heart.
After a particularly anxious week, I curled myself up on the couch and popped on a David Suchet Poirot episode. I was transported to nights in my mom’s bed watching it together, our special thing. And then again to the summer before junior year of college when I had about $50 to my name and was renting Poirot on DVD from the city library as my “fun little treat”. I find Agatha Christie’s stories soothing. Though they may be about death, intrigue, and heartache, their predictability (in that the crimes are always solved) paired with their complexity (it’s hard to figure out on our own) make them the ideal comfort program.
As such, this week I’m writing about The Mirror Crack’d (1980, 101 minutes), a feature length Miss Marple adaptation made with a dazzling cast. In this Christie classic, a large Hollywood production company comes to St. Mary Mead to film a period piece about Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I. As a result, the village is overrun with Hollywood starlets and sleazy men. There is Marina Gregg-Rudd (Elizabeth Taylor) the film’s star, Jason Rudd (Rock Hudson) her husband and the film’s director, and Lola Brewster (Kim Novak), Marina’s arch nemesis and co-star. Soon after their arrival, a local woman, Mrs. Babcock (Maureen Bennett) is poisoned drinking from a glass handed to her by Jason and, as we later learn, intended for Marina. After hearing just a few details, Miss Marple (Angela Lansbury), knows there’s more to it all and is determined to find out what exactly that more is.
Poirot’s stories often lend themselves to ensemble casts because he circulates in the upper echelon of society -- Nile cruises, extravagant resorts, country estates-- he’s always with the rich, beautiful, or famous. Now, Miss Marple on the other hand, she’s our country lady. She uses the power of gossip, off-hand comments, and village history to solve the crimes that come her way. In fact, Marple is an intensely interesting feminist icon when you think about it. Her use of traditionally feminine traits (and therefore maligned) alongside her natural intelligence is what makes her such a great detective. Without her ability to get the dirt on suspects and victims from her wide network of busy bodies, she’d be up a creek… like the police often are. Marple doesn’t need a badge and a gun, she needs a telephone and a good neighbor.
As such, The Mirror Crack’d is a change of pace for our amateur sleuth in that movie stars have arrived to town, both literally and figuratively, giving us a Poirot-like ensemble cast. The dashing stars arrive and hold a garden party for St. Mary Mead in hopes of winning the villagers over while they make their Oscar-worthy (maybe) picture. At the time, Elizabeth Taylor hadn’t made a film in three years which adds a weighty subtext to her performance as Marina, an actress attempting to make a comeback after a nervous breakdown years before. The breakdown, it is revealed, is because the son Marina was told she’d never be able to have, was born with severe brain damage after she caught Rubella during a performance. Taylor plays Marina as fragile but not undone. A woman not self-centered, but protective of her center and wary of letting anyone close to it. This caginess is what causes us as audience to be fearful and worried about her husband Jason (Hudson) as it’s revealed early on that he’s having an affair with his assistant. He can’t be trusted and worse, will the reveal of the killer’s intention rattle Marina further? Taylor’s performance doesn’t have layers, but folds that you can get lost in even while desperately trying to stay focused on the mystery at hand.
Warning: Spoilers do follow from this point forth!
Rock Hudson’s performance of Jason, for the most part, is less inspired and a bit tired. He’s a grumpy movie director having an affair. And while I know there’s not much to do with a character written that way, Hudson feels to be phoning in his performance for most of the movie. That is until the very abrupt ending where he falls apart admitting that once he figured out the truth-- that it wasn’t an accident and Marina in fact poisoned Mrs. Babcock-- he couldn’t let her live through more pain and poisons Marina to save her from the pain of being found out. He’s stricken with grief, downing glass after glass of whiskey at 10 in the morning, and believably in love with Marina for the first time the whole damn movie. I only wish I had seen these layers of complexity in his performance earlier on. And perhaps they were there and I was just starstruck by Elizabeth Taylor who burns so bright-- basically the same reaction as the townspeople who miss Marina’s poisoning of Mrs. Babcock. They are starstruck. I’m starstruck. It happens.
Lola Brewster (Kim Novak) serves as our comedic relief. A flamboyant, self obsessed, air-headed actress determined only to outshine her rival, Marina. The two women share a hysterical exchange of insults so cutting, reality TV stars should take notes:
Angela Lansbury plays a more shrewd Marple than I am familiar with, remembering other depictions from childhood as a woman a little bit goofier. That said, she does take a spill early on, hurting her ankle, and is thus stuck at home for almost the entire movie. Marple solves the case from hearsay only, using the secondhand stories of her housecleaner, the vicar, and her Scotland Yard nephew. She leaves the house to meet Marina and Jason, at the very end, revealing all. She is tall country stock, a bit pale, a bit of a know it all. Like Poirot, she isn’t generically likable, but can charm you if you spend enough time with her. This performance of Marple would of course launch Lansbury into her most iconic role as Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote. There were to be two more Lansbury-as-Marple films, but the movie basically bombed and the rest were canceled.
Filtered into the movie are some halfway decent supporting players, the most interesting is Jason’s assistant Ella Zielinsky played by Geraldine Chaplin. Early into the mystery we are thrown off by a bit of a red herring created by Ella. She scurries off to public phone booths to make phone calls saying, “I saw you, I know it was you.” So, we think she knows something. It isn’t until later, when she too is murdered for her knowledge, that we learn she didn’t know anything at all and was simply accusing everyone she could to try and flush them out. Despite her affair with Jason, she is desperately loyal to him and Marina, seeking to only keep them safe. In the end, tragically, she is murdered by the very ones she seeks to protect. A keen reminder that work is just work and we should keep it that way.
While the plot of The Mirror Crack’d is a bit of a generic Christie story with some of her favorite tactics applied (i.e. the devil is in the details), the movie is an entertaining enough journey with an ensemble cast that feels like a Hollywood daydream. I do think Marple shines best when she’s solving a village crime, but I’ll take this for what it is. I will leave you with the part of the Tennyson poem that the book and movie geet their titles from:
Out flew the web and floated wide—
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me", cried
The Lady of Shalott.
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