Murder Most Foul (1965) – Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple finds herself on a jury and disagreeing with everyone else on the guilty verdict. When the accused goes free the police aren’t happy. When she decides to figure out who DID commit the murder, their lives get even more complicated and Miss Marple joins a theater troupe.
Directed by George Pollock Starring Margaret Rutherford, Stringer Davis
Why I Liked It: Rutherford is a proper English busybody detective.
Christie fans will note that the source material, “Mrs. McGinty’s Dead” is a Poirot novel, not Marple. This movie is the third of a four movie series, and they adapted Poirot stories at least twice. Rutherford plays the senior “detective” as a force of nature, and is a blast to watch doing it. Miss Marple fears nothing and no one. Her audition piece for the theater group that is the center of the story is the 1907 Robert Service poem, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”. It’s easy to believe that it was a personal favorite of the actress as she brings all the melodrama into her reading. That same sense of comic high drama informs every moment of the iconic detective’s screen time.
This is just a bit of fun, as the soundtrack makes clear from the opening shot. The movies were done in the early to mid-60s and they have the kind of chirpy, happy go lucky sound that so much of British movie music seemed to have then.
Rutherford’s Marple (along with her doting sidekick, the local librarian, Jim Stringer, played by Rutherford’s real life husband Stringer Davis) has great fun tweaking the noses of all authority figures, never taking no for an answer, and telling the occasional fib. In the end, it is inevitable that she will run the murderer to ground. and then return to her village of St. Mary Mead.
A court room, a mystery, several murders, some fun behind the scenes of the theater, and Miss Marple taking all. There’s nothing profound to be found here, other than a good old fashioned good time.
Rating – *** Worth A Look
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