Miss Marple: The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side **** (1992, Joan Hickson, Claire Bloom, Barry Newman) – Classic Movie Review 9,646

The dust jacket illustration of the 1962 first UK edition.

Alas, all good things have to come to an end. The splendid Joan Hickson takes on her 12th and final case as the BBC’s Miss Marple, in the 1992 TV mystery film The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. 

Director Norman Stone’s shrewd 1992 TV movie Miss Marple: The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side again stars Joan Hickson, along with Claire Bloom, Barry Newman, Gwen Watford, Glynis Barber, Norman Rodway and John Castle, and David Horovitch and Ian Brimble as Superintendent Slack and Sergeant Lake. It was first broadcast on 27 December 1992.

Alas, all good things have to come to an end. At the grand old age of 86, the splendid Joan Hickson takes on her 12th and final case as the BBC’s Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s amateur detective sleuth, investigating a poisoning when a daiquiri proves lethal at a village fête in St Mary Mead.

It is 1960, and drugs, alcohol and E-type Jaguars are arriving in the spinster sleuth’s world of fairy cakes, tea and Morris Minors – along with a once-famous American film star Marina Gregg (Claire Bloom) and her director husband Jason Rudd (Barry Newman). A pushy female fan is poisoned by a drink apparently meant for Marina at a charity fète reception at her home as she makes a screen comeback. Miss Marple is on hand to investigate to stop the killer striking again.

With a lovely production and super performances, it is very pleasingly done. Typically, T R Bowen’s adaptation stays satisfyingly close to Mrs Christie’s original, with only a couple of major changes, one character removed, and Superintendent Slack and Sergeant Lake written in.

It is a remake of The Mirror Crack’d (1980) with Angela Lansbury in the role of Miss Marple and Elizabeth Taylor as Marina.

Also in the cast are Elizabeth Garvie, Judy Cornwell, John Cassaday, Christopher Hancock, Margaret Courtenay, Anna Niland, Rose Keegan, Christopher Good, and Barbara Hicks.

Margaret Courtenay appears as Miss Knight, having played Dolly Bantry in the 1980 film.

It was remade in 2010 by ITV Studios and WGBH Boston for the Marple TV series starring Julia McKenzie as Miss Marple, with Joanna Lumley reprising her role as Dolly Bantry and Lindsay Duncan as Marina Gregg.

It was also adapted for BBC radio in 1998 with June Whitfield as Miss Marple and Gayle Hunnicutt as Marina Gregg, in a 90-minute version by Michael Bakewell.

The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side was first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 12 November 1962 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in September 1963 as The Mirror Crack’d.

The title comes from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott: ‘Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; The curse is come upon me, cried The Lady of Shalott.’

The real-life tragedy of the birth of the first child of American actress Gene Tierney and her husband Oleg Cassini appears to be the basis of one plot point for the movie star character Marina Gregg but not Mrs Christie’s murder plot. While pregnant with her first child, Tierney came down with German measles and congenital rubella syndrome was passed on to the baby.

For the series, the makers kept to their plan to remain faithful to the plotlines and locations of Christie’s stories, and most of all to represent Miss Marple as Christie wrote her.

It follows The Body in the Library, The Moving Finger, A Murder Is Announced, A Pocketful of Rye. The Murder at the Vicarage,  Sleeping Murder, At Bertram’s Hotel, Nemesis, 4.50 from Paddington, A Caribbean Mystery, and They Do It with Mirrors.

Joan Bogle Hickson, OBE (5 August 1906 – 17 October 1998). She made her first film appearance in 1934, and her films included Carry On Nurse and Carry On Constable, as well as the Marple film Murder, She Said in 1961 when she played the housekeeper.

When the Queen gave her the OBE in June 1987, she was reported to have said: ‘You play the part just as one envisages.’

Barry Newman (November 7, 1930 – May 11, 2023) was best known for Vanishing Point, The Salzburg Connection and Fear Is the Key, and for playing Tony Petrocelli in The Lawyer (1970) and in the 1970s spinoff TV series Petrocelli.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9,646

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