Marple - 4.50 from Paddington - 2004

I liked this very much, one of my favourites no doubt :-) Starting from Marple's friend, coming for a little visit "I'm catching the 4.50 from Paddington" :-) I liked this Elspeth McGillicuddy (Pam Ferris) a lot :-) These two old women together were a hoot :) It goes like this: after having seen, while on the train, a man strangling a woman on a parallel train, she tells everything to Marple, and since nothing can be found on the newspaper about a strangling on a train, they go directly to the "railway police" where inspector Awdrey (Rob Brydon, nice job, just a little over the line here and there) laughs in their faces. They keep thinking about it, neither of them can forget it, so they try taking the same train, and Marple replies to Elspeth's concern with a "I doubt he makes a habit of strangling women on trains" :lol: with that serious/satyrical voice of great Geraldine McEwan :lol:
The scene when they want to reenact the murder was hilarious: Marple"Would you mind strangling me, Elspeth?" - "not at all Jane" - a man on the same wagon looks at them and Marple goes"please don't mind us" :lol: I loved them together :-)
After that, Marple looks at a map and finds the nearest house to the most likely place the body might have been placed/thrown/hidden, but she needs help this time, so she engages a brilliant young girl, Lucy Eyelesbarrow (Amanda Holden), a lovely character, I've always liked this character in the book, and it was well rendered here :-) Good :-)
She works as a housekeeper because she wants to, because she likes what the job can offer her, because she can do it well, she's very good. She likes to change place from time to time, to visit new places and meet new people, and she also likes to take on new adventures and new challenges, so she accepts Marple's request: "I want you to find a body" :-p
Lucy goes to work (and spy) at Rutherford Hall while Miss Marple stays not far away, at Tom's house (John Hannah, lovely from the first second :-D). It won't take him long to ask her: "are you up to something Miss Marple?" - "am I?" :-p  she never lies :-p
Lucy enters the house and meets the family, then she starts sneaking around and even asking questions.
I did not like that scene where Alfred (Ben Daniels) cries over the woman who left him (for another man, she's not the dead one).
One night Lucy goes looking inside the family mausoleum and finds it! Tom comes to the house because he's Detective Inspector Campbell :-) Lucy tells him the whole truth, and he believes her because he knows Miss Marple :-p
Lucy stays at the Hall to keep looking, and they share their news - once he lied about her having some dirt on her chin just to touch her :-p adorable :-p - I really never understood why I like John Hannah so much. He's not exactly beautiful, no, (as always, so very personal opinion) but he's got something, indeed. It may sound silly, but I like the way he looks at people , that intensity of the eyes,   and his smile when Marple gave him a goodnight kiss on the forehead, and his little mouth :-) I find these things adorable :-) Anyway, moving on.
Doctor David Quimper (Griff Rhys Jones) is now engaged to Emma Crackenthorpe (Niamh Cusack), and tells Tom about late Edmund's wife Martine who the family saw only once and nobody knows what became of her. Martine wrote a fortnight ago to say she was coming, but she never arrived. Apparently she wanted money for her son.
Marple goes to Rutherford Hall to meet 'her niece' and look at everyone :-p while Tom is waiting not far away.
Alfred was the first suspect, being the eldest, but he dies too. The rest of the family reunited in the house : Luther Crackenthorpe, Emma's grumpy father (David Warner), her youngest brother Cedric the painter (Ciaràn McMenamin), her brother-in-law Bryan (Michael Landes) with his son Alexander (his wife died giving birth and now he likes Lucy) plus her slimy brother Harold (Charlie Creed-Miles) with his poor, annoying wife Lady Alice (Rose Keegan).
Tom and Marple find out that a French dancer who's gone missing, she had an English husband, but she's not Martine. Martine is alive and well, and comes here with her son to clear things up. She remarried and her son is Alexander's friend James.
Bryan keeps flirting with Lucy, and he's very cute and nice and sweet :-)
So, it would seem like the solution is almost like in the book. The dancer married the doctor years ago, then they separated but she would never accept a divorce, so he killed her to be free to marry Emma. Marple says he did it out of love (:-/ ), to marry her, while in the book it was for her money, if I remember right.
Case solved. Now, a scene I loved was when Tom first meets Lucy, to interrogate her after she found the girl's body:
Tom: you suffer from insomnia and went for a midnight walk and then you thought to look in the mausoleum to see what it was like
Lucy: No
T (confused): no?
L: that's what I told Miss Crackenthorpe, but,  I was looking for the body. A friend of mine told me it was somewhere here
T: why would he, or she, think there was a body at Rutherford Hall?
L: She.. (his face here, he knows it already :-p) a friend of hers saw a woman murdered on a train. I know it sounds improbable, but my friend is never wrong
T: let me guess your friend's name :-p

At the end of the movie, Marple says "that's a girl who travels alone" but she doesn't, Lucy chooses Tom over Bryan, and Marple "I'm not always right" :-p
At Christmas, the three of them, Tom Lucy and Marple, are in Tom's house, and Tom and Lucy sweetly hold hands, and Marple, always the knitting one, has to choose between pink and blue wool :-p How sweet :-)

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