Watch Miss Marple: The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side For Free

Simply A Masterpiece

Sadly Over-hyped

Memorable, crazy movie

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The poor village of Saint Mary Mead is invaded by some American actors and actresses for the shooting of a film. The main actress was actually raised in the village before moving to America. It's obvious Miss Marple does not consider cinema actors as very respectable people, though that is no reason to kill them. But apparently it is by far enough to justify their suicide. The story is sordid about the past, but that is nearly nothing when compared with the sordidness of the present they impose onto themselves and one another. Working conditions of actors and actresses are horrific and producers are the worst exploiters that can exist and they deserve our full and complete condescending contempt. Add into that picture a couple of adopted children, rejected afterwards, and then a real child reduced to an incurable fate by German measles during the pregnancy and you have the squalid reality of this case. So it is nearly nice of Jane Marple to overlook the slight detail that the death of that actress was not entirely natural though it looks suicidal, or maybe not entirely suicidal though it looks absolutely natural, or whatever other mixture with artificial added in the lot. In one word good riddance and just hope God is just as understanding as we are not.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Hickson's Miss Marple has always struck me as very authentic, and this adaptation captures the tone and feel of the book very well, cutting-out some of the complexities (Marina Gregg's first husband, events concerning the butler) that burdened the book with unhelpful and implausible complexities. But one key observation in the book, about the flaw in Heather Badcock's nature that led to her death, made this book my favorite Christie, and it ought not to have been cut. In Miss Marple's first meeting with her, Badcock's conversation causes Miss Marple to recognize a similarity between Badcock and an old acquaintance of Miss Marple, Alison Wilde. At the end of the book, Miss Marple explains (SPOILER coming): 'Quite so,' said Miss Marple, '(Marina Gregg) never knew (who gave her the German Measles that crippled her baby) until one afternoon here when a perfectly strange woman came up those stairs and told her the fact - told her, what was more - with a great deal of pleasure! With an air of being proud of what she'd done! She thought she'd been resourceful and brave and shown a lot of spirit in getting up from her bed, covering her face with make-up, and going along to meet the actress on whom she had such a crush and obtaining her autograph. It's a thing she has boasted of all through her life. Heather Badcock meant no harm. She never did mean harm but there is no doubt that people like Heather Badcock (and like my old friend Alison Wilde), are capable of doing a lot of harm because they lack not kindness, they have kindness - but any real consideration for the way their actions may affect other people. She thought always of what an action meant to her, never sparing a thought to what it might mean to somebody else.'The whole book thus is driven not by greed for money, or lust, or fear of exposure, or blackmail -- the typical drivers of murder mysteries -- but by the devastating effects of self- centered thoughtlessness by a person who never meant anyone any harm. It is a book with a moral message: that it is incumbent on all of us not merely to be free of any overt desire to do harm to another person, but to take thought as to how our plans and proposed actions may nevertheless hurt others. This aspect of The Mirror Cracked raises it above all the other Christie novels that I've read (and I've by no means read all that many) by giving it a subtlety that others do not have. It is a shame that Miss Marple does not say in this adaptation the lines she says in the book that make this theme clear. As a mystery, the adaptation has a fundamental flaw: in reality, the police would have focused on Marina Gregg's drink, from the moment she gave it to Heather all the way back to the waitress's tray and to the bar before that, examining in detail everyone who was near it, and the police would almost certainly have ascertained within an hour or two after the party that only Marina could have poisoned it. Who could have not only gotten access to the drug, but known it was poisonous, and gotten it into Marina's own glass? Members of the household might know about the drug and might have gotten a dose in advance, but when might they get access to the glass during the party and yet escape detection? Outsiders would not know about the drug. Moreover, the police would certainly have questioned the waitress and cleared-up the bit about who jogged Badcock's arm. This adaptation thus depends entirely on the trick of making us not notice the fact that the police have failed to do what any police department would have done immediately. What makes Christie's technique particularly clever is that she gives us a police detective (Craddock) who is so calm, thoughtful, and intelligent, and yet burdened with a nasty fault-finding boss who surely will spot any incompetence by Craddock, we naturally assume that the police, as we see them in the story, are doing as competent a job as any police force could do -- when in fact the police (Craddock especially) are quite incompetent. And the last touch, by the casting director, is to cast an actor whom most women viewers will find especially attractive, so that they are even more inclined to want to believe that he is doing everything that a competent police detective would do.

It may not be the best of the bunch but it's still a good TV movie. A nice touch is the fact that we see several faces that we saw in Murder At The Vicarage an earlier movie of this series. There is Dolly Bantrey ( now a widow), there is the vicar ( he was not the vicar in Murder at the vicarage but seems to have made a promotion) and some more characters. This one is surely better than the movie with Liz Taylor and Angela Lansbury. This was the last one of the series and it's a shame they did not continue it with movies of some of the Miss Marple short stories. Hickson was - up till now - the best Miss Marple. Let's hope they 'll find another person just as good and still use the short stories!

I have a problem with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. Although Agatha Christie always considered her as the ideal Miss Marple (way before she even played the detective) I think she is too slow, too boring, too anything but exciting. The TV movie has nothing to do with the 1981 Angela Lansbury - version, but has everything to do with the book. In the 1981 version, lots of characters had been dropped that were in the book, but in this tv movie, every detail has been respected. But I missed the catty relationship between the two movie stars like in the 1981 film.