First-season Poirot, not at all bad but not outstanding. The story takes us into Parade Studios, where a kind of "Sheik of Araby" is being filmed. The director is a real brow-beating rat who tries to seduce the pretty young actress by blackmailing her about a secret which will never be revealed on this page.
The authoritarian scoundrel is found on the floor of his room, dead, his occiput stoved in, after an argument with the pretty young leading lady and after the firing of his fading older star, who looks like Errol Flynn. As is so often the case, nobody has any real reason to like the victim.
Poirot has the fulgurating intuition of Lieutenant Columbo. He notices that all the curtains of the room in which the crime was committed were drawn closed except one. And that one curtain was supposed to have been drawn closed with all the rest. Ah, yes -- but why? The pretty young actress evidently discovered the body and ran to the nearest house whose lights she saw through a copse of trees. And when Poirot and Hastings visit the neighbors' house, the occupants claim that they'd been playing bridge. BUT -- Poirot, ever alert, notices that the deck they'd been playing with contained only fifty-one cards. (Kids: That means one card was missing, the eponymous king of clubs.) When Poirot realizes this, he looks up from the card table and beams with satisfaction -- the crime, she is solved! Except that there was no crime. Well, none worth bothering with except maybe mayhem, fleeing the scene of a crime, abetting a fugitive, obstruction of justice, and first-degree fibbing. I'm still mulling over the meaning of the missing card, which eluded me.
I enjoyed it, despite its relatively ordinary quality. I enjoyed watching Hastings trying to explain a piece of cubist sculpture to Poirot: "They say the artist shows all sides at once; that way you don't have to walk round the back to look at it." I enjoyed the names in the cast list, right out of an old British novel: Niamh Cusack, Jack Klaff, Rosie Timson, Gawn Grainger, Abigail Cruttenden, and Sean Pertwee. They might all have been born in Lower Muckle-on-Yare.
The authoritarian scoundrel is found on the floor of his room, dead, his occiput stoved in, after an argument with the pretty young leading lady and after the firing of his fading older star, who looks like Errol Flynn. As is so often the case, nobody has any real reason to like the victim.
Poirot has the fulgurating intuition of Lieutenant Columbo. He notices that all the curtains of the room in which the crime was committed were drawn closed except one. And that one curtain was supposed to have been drawn closed with all the rest. Ah, yes -- but why? The pretty young actress evidently discovered the body and ran to the nearest house whose lights she saw through a copse of trees. And when Poirot and Hastings visit the neighbors' house, the occupants claim that they'd been playing bridge. BUT -- Poirot, ever alert, notices that the deck they'd been playing with contained only fifty-one cards. (Kids: That means one card was missing, the eponymous king of clubs.) When Poirot realizes this, he looks up from the card table and beams with satisfaction -- the crime, she is solved! Except that there was no crime. Well, none worth bothering with except maybe mayhem, fleeing the scene of a crime, abetting a fugitive, obstruction of justice, and first-degree fibbing. I'm still mulling over the meaning of the missing card, which eluded me.
I enjoyed it, despite its relatively ordinary quality. I enjoyed watching Hastings trying to explain a piece of cubist sculpture to Poirot: "They say the artist shows all sides at once; that way you don't have to walk round the back to look at it." I enjoyed the names in the cast list, right out of an old British novel: Niamh Cusack, Jack Klaff, Rosie Timson, Gawn Grainger, Abigail Cruttenden, and Sean Pertwee. They might all have been born in Lower Muckle-on-Yare.