Agatha Christie's Miss Marple: 4:50 from Paddington
(TV 1987)
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Agatha Christie's Miss Marple: 4:50 from Paddington
(TV 1987)
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| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
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Joan Hickson | ... | |
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Juliette Mole | ... | |
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David Beames | ... | |
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Mona Bruce | ... | |
| Nicholas Blane | ... |
Paddington Porter
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Katy Jarrett | ... |
Mary
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Leslie Adams | ... |
Desk Sergeant
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David Horovitch | ... | |
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Ian Brimble | ... | |
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Rhoda Lewis | ... | |
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Jill Meager | ... | |
| Joanna David | ... | ||
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Maurice Denham | ... | |
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Andrew Burt | ... | |
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Pamela Pitchford | ... | |
When Miss Marple's visiting friend sees a woman being strangled on a passing train, they immediately report it to the police. Inspector Slack sees Miss Marple as a bit of a busy body and drops the investigation after only a few days. Miss Marple however determines that there is only one spot along the line where a body could have been dumped and it happens to be very near the Crackenthorpe estate. She asks a professional housekeeper, Lucy Eyelesbarrow, to go there undercover as a domestic. She soon finds the dead woman's body at which time the police take on a renewed interest but it is left to Miss Marple to solve the mystery. Written by garykmcd
The Marple stories - many of them - are lessons in narrative placement. We start with the basic notion of the mystery narrator shuffling through multiple created realities looking for what makes sense. Marple turns that into the clever notion of detection as gossip: the constructed realities of small town busybodies imposing a simple order on what they hear.
Read this story and see how wonderfully it plays this intelligent game. Now watch this movie version and see how it completely loses this neat idea.
Instead, they follow the BBC rule of exploiting interesting faces and spaces. Lucy IS lovely, but the magic of the mystery is long gone.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.