Marple - The secret of Chimneys

It wasn't bad but of course there's the usual little problem of wanting to put too many things in not enough time. I liked the inspector though.
The plot: once again someone invited Marple and then someone died.. I say: don't tempt fate, don't play with luck, leave Marple at her own village, what the... anyway, Chimneys! Big house of Lord Caterham (Edward Fox) and his two daughters : Virginia (Charlotte Salt) and 'Bundle' (Dervla Kirwan). Virginia is the focus of the show, Bundle is there for no reason at all, she's useless, and that was rather annoying because that name is associated with quite a different figure of a girl. There's an unpleasant man - George I think is the name - (Adam Godley) and his secretary Bill (Matthew Horne) both hoping to marry Virginia. There's an Austrian Count (Anthony Higgins) invited by that man to sign some kind of contract. There's the loyal maid Tredwell (Michelle Collins) , also Blenkinsopp (Ruth Jones) a woman who wants to buy Chimneys for some reason I don't remember, and of course Miss Marple (Julia McKenzie), cousin of the lady of the house who died maybe a year before.
That night the Count says he'll sign the contract with George if he'll give him Chimneys as a bonus gift. Lord Caterham signs too, against Bundle's will. They all go to bed then a man wakes them up and they all come down to hear that a guard has been knocked out. They hear a loud noise and they all say it was a shot and the Count is missing. They look for him and when they try Chimneys' secret passage they find him there with a young man. The Count has been shot and says the Austrian word for 'wall' before dying. The young man is Anthony Cade (Jonas Armstrong), another one in love with Virginia, but one she actually loves back.
Inspector Finch (Stephen Dillane) comes to investigate. He was my favourite character on the show; he was nice, I like the way he spoke and that he brought Marple in on the case and the investigation. There's a lot of talk around a famous diamond that was stolen 23-24 years before during a party at Chimneys: young maid Agnes is thought of as the thief, until Tredwell reveals that that night she saw the count (back then he was a musician) dispose of her dead body by placing it inside a tomb. After that she's found dead too, and in her room they find many letters that she had hidden: love letters from the count, so they think, at first, that they had stolen the diamond and wanted to retrieve it now. A bit absurd, but then the solution: the fire that Cade saw that night was set to cause the loud noise they all heard, but the murder had already been committed. Not Tredwell but Lady Madeleine had had an affair with the musician/now-count. Lord Caterham had accidentally killed poor Agnes in his determination to witness the truth and covered it up by staging the theft. He had allowed the count in his house with the plan to kill him. He had retrieved the diamond buried with Agnes' body and put it in the pond where Marple went to pick it up again. He had killed Tredwell too, probably fearing that she would ultimately reveal the truth about the affair, but she wouldn't have and by killing her he doomed himself because they found Madeleine's letters that she was trying to hide from them. The big jewel the count was looking for was not the diamond but Virginia, his daughter, although it is not clear to me what that map and the 'wall-word' meant, how they lead to this truth. Anyway, in this kind of films they always try the same tricks so I was sure it was him because he seemed to be the only one with the perfect alibi, since he was with Marple when they heard the 'shot'.
I didn't like how hard they tried to make the audience suspect Tredwell: from the start she was shown with a mysterious expression like someone with a big secret, like someone who is plotting something. There's nothing to say about Bundle because she was totally useless as a character, they made her so: she was there to say she didn't want to sell the house, and nothing more. No father-daughter moment (it seemed almost as Virginia was his only daughter: my darling here, my darling there....), no sisters-moment, nothing. I would have liked it if she had joined the investigation, maybe taking a fancy to the bright inspector, or maybe not. Anyway, doing something!
Conclusion: nice enough, but not good.

2010
ITA il segreto di Chimneys