Nothing is serious in this criminal detective and private eye story. It is all humor, oh no, fun really. But who is getting the fun out of the story? Agatha Christie? For sure, and she even manages to put a direct allusion at her famous dramatic success in London for more years than anyone else, The Mousetrap. But she is making fun at a bishop, a lord and a few other social entities. And she enjoys it enormously. But we could wonder if it is not Miss Marple who is making fun of all these heavy heads and straight jacketed minds. We would be right too. She obviously makes fun of the poor detective inspector or chief inspector, of the captain, of a few more people in the dear society of Winchester. She appears as an eccentric, and she cultivates that appearance because one has to keep up appearances and because that's her true hallmark and method to capture the attention of those she wants not to see what she is really doing. To go inconspicuous, this Miss Marple knows we have to go very visible. But it could also be Margaret Rutherford who is enjoying herself at our expense, and there too I think we have a point. She seems to be enjoying herself so much that she could be God himself come down incognito. This film is a little gem of such nice detective suspense laced and stuffed with a lot of British or English humor, with a lot of tongues in a lot of cheeks. Quite interesting if we consider it as a remnant and a testimony of a time when computers did not exist and scientific police was not yet a glimmer in the eye of an administrative law and order progenitor. And we managed to arrest criminals in those days when we did not even have a computer to process and identify finger prints.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines