I like it. I know purists of books would probably hate it, or at least be really upset with how greatly they changed this story. I don’t know why they did it, but it is very different in many many ways. There are, of course, a few points that are the same: who dies, and who killed him. At least this was left the same…
I don’t know what came into them when they decided to do this film/episode, and why they changed so much. They left out my dear Superintendent Battle and introduced Wheeler instead, probably so they could suspect him as well, maybe, who knows.
They also changed important things about the past of the four characters. I’ll explain:
Shaitana is a rich, odd man who invites to his house four people that have something to do with murder from the right side, which are Poirot, Battle, a colonel and our very dear Ariadne Oliver, the famous crime novel writer. He also invites four people that he believes have committed murder and got away with it. Young Anne Meredith, Major Despard, Mrs Lorrimer and Doctor Roberts.
Spoilers for whoever might ever read this but mostly for future me.
In this film they imply that the four of them plus Wheeler are the only ones that could have done it. Major Despard did shoot a man, but for a good cause after the latter had taken some drug that caused him to go berserk on his wife, so Despard saved her by shooting him. I do think, though, that a man who knows how to shoot, from such a short distance, might have maybe just wounded him, without having to kill him…?
Mrs Lorrimer did kill her first husband years ago because she wanted to marry someone else. Her second husband died of a bad heart one year later, what she calls “poetic justice”. The first husband was Anne’s father, and Anne saw her mother push him down the stairs killing him, and left the house and never saw her mother again until now. Yet at the end she hugs her, apparently forgetting/forgiving the past… I wonder if that’s something you could ever forgive. I understand she’s her mother but still…
Anne is a thief, and when she was working for an elderly woman she was found out stealing. The old woman then died of poisoning, of an accident, but Poirot reveals that it was her best friend Rhoda who killed her to make Anne believe it was her fault and keep her always with her. When Rhoda tries to kill Anne, Major Despard comes and throws himself into the lake (not before removing his shoes, his jacket and his vest, of course, the girls just have to wait..) and saves Anne first because he rather fancies her, then goes back for Rhoda but doesn’t find her. She’s dead somewhere . Doctor Roberts killed Mrs Craddock because she had found out that he was her husband’s lover, and was sick of it, but still went to him for her injections before her trip to Egypt… so he contaminated the needle, and days later in Egypt she met Shaitana and told him everything: not sure here how she could be so certain that the doctor was responsible. I mean, he was, but how could she know?
Wheeler never committed a murder, but he’s a married man who had a relationship with Shaitana (I guess it was with him, otherwise he wouldn’t have been the one making the picture) and now Poirot gives him as a gift the pictures he has found.
It seems to me that this film is not very gentle with homosexuality, is it? Not so much in the reaction of Mrs Craddock, she had a right to be angry since it was her husband after all, but it’s all the rest. It’s the embarrassment of everyone when Poirot reveals that the Doctor had a relationship with Mr Craddock, and it’s also the attitude of Poirot with Wheeler at the end. I know this is not set in our days, and things were very different then, and yet this is not what happened in the book, now, is it? So they deliberately wrote this motive. Why?
It would also appear from this version that Shaitana was wrong about one of his guests, because Anne never killed anyone, Rhoda did… while Anne appears like a pure, fragile girl with a difficult past… and yet a thief who has always stolen in her life…
After all this, why did I start saying that I liked it? Well, simply because: I always love David Suchet’s Poirot, he’s the real thing, the only one that ever did the “real” Poirot, he’s perfect.
I love Zoe Wanamaker as Ariadne Oliver, so great, and perfect in her role as much as Suchet.
These two are the main reasons, yes. I also liked very much Lesley Manville who played Mrs Lorrimer. She was great.
I find it a bit sad, somehow, that Alexander Siddig who played Shaitana changed his name. I mean, I remember him from ST-DS9 and he was Siddig El Fadil back then, but he changed it to the easier Alexander Siddig. I read somewhere that he changed it because people couldn’t pronounce it before… really? Seriously? Come on, if people could pronounce Schwarzenegger what was so difficult about Fadil???
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