The Mirror Crack'd (1980)

The trailer

Angela did Nile followed by a good remake of The Lady Vanishes the previous year. Maybe she was just Agathed out?

R2 Maybe. The best part of the whole movie is the opening "Murder at Midnight."

It was an okay movie but it was pretty much a fade-out for Elizabeth Taylor's movie career, ditto for Kim Novak. Their feud scenes were the best.

Never saw it, but just from the trailer R1 posted, neither Liz or Kim give it any punch. Both of them couldn't act for shit (after a certain point Taylor decided shrillness was the same as acting) but they at least had charisma at some point in their careers. That was long gone by the time The Mirror Crack'd.

Elizabeth Taylor was cast after Natalie Wood turned the role down.

Moderately fun movie, not nearly as good as the 1970s big-screen Christie adaptations, largely because of La Liz.

Novak is actually fun, with a small role as a campy diva, but Taylor has a large and crucial rule... and she's terrible. Lifeless. Wimpy. Looking chubby and middle-aged. Dreadfully dressed in her standard "Liz" stuff, and not period costumes. The script is clever and the rest of the cast is terrific, so the movie is fun, but Taylor really lets down the side.

That is the worst Agatha Christie adaptation of all time. Just plain terrible.

Rock Hudson looks like he'd just had a face-lift for this movie.

He must've been disappointed he went through all that when Liz showed up looking like a fat little frau with a double-chin...

Angela Lansbury is at her know-it-all worst in this movie

Just consider that there were only 14 years between this and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The difference between 2007 and now. Liz had a great run in the 40s-50s-60s, but that was it.

Hated it!

As if Natalie Wood could have saved this trash.

Angela Lansbury has such an odd take on Miss Marple, so grim and starchy. I get that she didn't want to play her as a bumbling little old lady but, Jeeez.....did she have to smoke cigarettes!?

Both Liz and Kim look like they had way too much control over their costumes.

Wood turned it down because she didn’t want to be seen as a washed up movie star. She was still trying to go for A list projects (Ordinary People and Sophie’s Choice).

Was this the first movie Liz looked like a real cow in?

She even resorts to a caftan at one point, presumably having split the seams of every other costume in stock.

Two years ago you could have bought her frumpfest flowered hat for $3,750!

It had one great line. I still remember it. In fact, it could serve as OP's one-line review;

"I could swallow a can of Kodak and vomit a better movie."

R15, Natalie had also turned down Faye Dunaway's roles in "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Towering Inferno".

The problem was Elizabeth Taylor. The constant mention of the stunningly beautiful actress and then Taylor shows up looking like an average dumpy housewife. Then she foolishly tried to play herself younger looking more like a short fat drag act at a working mans club on a Saturday night. Novak was no better. It needed two good actresses.

I'm actually relieved to hear others don't like this movie so much. I'm a big Agatha fan, but this one doesn't really do it for me at all. It's not terrible, but I much prefer either of the other two adaptations of this. I recently reread the book too, and there is such a sense of melancholy coming through, so much about how Miss Marple can no longer take care of herself, and her village is changing and modernising right before her eyes. I found all that quite interesting. Lansbury isn't really my idea of Miss Marple. Even in an interview I saw of her on YouTube taken around this time she was saying she hoped in the next one she would be able to move around more and detect, rather than just sitting at home.

R12: you know your onions.

I did enjoy their trading barbs about one another. (They start at 1:13.)

Alright, this is both horrible and fun to watch. I'm sure Kim Novak loved camping it up throughout the whole film.

Agatha Christie movie adaptations were a treat back then, so I enjoyed it at the time. It would be years between movies. 1974 gave us the excellent Murder on the Orient Express and the not-so-excellent And Then There Were None. Then we had to wait four years for Death on the Nile in 1978, then another two for Mirror in 1980, then yet another two for Evil Under the Sun in 1982.

I didn't see it here in the U.S. until it was on HBO, so maybe not until 1981? I don't think it ever came to the cinema in my town. My mother loved it because it had stars from the 1950s and 60s like Liz, Kim, Rock Hudson, and Tony Curtis. I thought Liz captured the faded movie star persona, but that was hardly a stretch for her at the time. I think in this movie you can see what the years of drinking had done to Rock's looks. As much as I like Angela Lansbury, she was not a good Miss Marple.

Just a few years later, the Miss Marple TV adaptation with Joan Hickson (IMO the best Marple ever) and the Poirot adaptation with David Suchet (IMO the best Poirot ever) set the standard that has yet to be reached again.

Does anyone know why it took so long for these all-star adaptations of Christie to be done? They would have seemed like a no-brainer during the Golden Age studio system-driven years of Hollywood.

MGM's Murder on the Orient Express (1938) starring; Norma Shearer, Wallace Beery, Lana Turner, Robert Taylor, Hedy Lamarr, Charles Boyer, Margaret Sullavan, Lionel Barrymore, Mary Astor, Frank Morgan, Maureen O'Sullivan, James Stewart and Maria Ouspenskaya and starring William Powell as Hercule Poirot; Gowns by Adrian.

Was Christie not allowing film adaptations of her books?

It's *puke*, r18.

Angela says she hates what the producers did to the movie, and I agree. First they insisted they wanted a "straight" Miss Marple without the Margaret Rutherford-type idiosyncrasies. Then they have her break her leg early in the first half and she disappears until the ending. In her place was her nephew played by Edward Fox, a cute but incredibly dull actor.

It could've been much better if they let Angie be kookie Angie all the way through.

I liked seeing all the old movie stars looking pretty good for their ages (Novak, Taylor, Hudson, Curtis). And I loved the score.

I think Hickson was probably the truest Marple, r24, but Rutherford was the most enjoyable.

Of course this movie also has the non-speaking role played by Pierce Brosnan where Liz clasps him to her ample bosom.

R25, I remember them talking about this on All About Agatha. I have a vague feeling that the Americans did want to do a version of Murder on the Orient Express back in the 30s, but can't remember why it didn't happen now.

Of course by the 50s and 60s Agatha was really unhappy with what was being done with her books (like the Margaret Rutherford movies or Tony Randall's The ABC Murders) and was really loathe to allow people to film them. I think Murder was able to be done because of the rights that were bought back in the 30s actually. And that was done well, and faithfully enough that the Christie Estate were more amenable to allowing adaptations.

Christie died not long after, but her daughter took over from her, deciding to allow some adaptations, slowly but surely.

But I think someone else would know the ins and outs of this better than I. Probably Mark Aldridge, who has written a book on this very thing.

Casting Rutherford as Marple is like casting Bob Hope as Poirot, but, guess what, it worked (at least in the context of those adaptations, which leaned heavy on the character comedy, and light on the suspense and mystery).

The scene when Rock Hudson inspects the guards is quite homophobic. "You are supposed to be the queen soldiers not her ballerinas". And then he looks at a guys ass as he walks off, and shakes his head.

Tony Curtis is pretty good in his role.

R16, I'd say that was Cleopatra. Maybe not the full cow bit her frumpiness began to break through at certain angles.

Why is OP crossed out and labeled a troll? I thought this was a cool thread.