![]() ![]() Durrant, both a hero and victim of World War II, is by turns nasty, self-pitying, and venal. The bickering offspring are varying shades of feckless, wounded, entitled, venomous, or all of the above-the departed Jack being perhaps the worst of the lot. How it’s arrived at, however, might cause you to scratch your head in puzzlement.Īs is normal in these tales, absolutely everybody (except Calgary) had good motive to put Rachel out of their misery, as she ruined each and every one of them. That there’s a resolution is a given (there always is) it’s a good one, and it’s more compelling than Christie’s. Calgary deserves a hearing and, if so, which among them is really the killer. The Argyll progeny, Calgary, Kristen, and Mary Argyll’s crippled husband Philip Durrant (Matthew Goode: Downton Abbey) have to rely on their often scattered wits to puzzle out whether Dr. However, this also means there’s no personified center to the story. There’s no master detective on the case this time we won’t be distracted by Poirot’s mustache or Marple’s anecdotes. ![]() Innocence is one of five 1950s Christie novels that doesn’t feature one of her series characters. All this means that if you memorized the novel, this will still be a new experience for you, for good or ill. Calgary has gained a history of mental instability, making him much less reliable as a witness, and the culprit and motive are significantly different from those in the book. ![]() Writer Sarah Phelps, who also penned the recent BBC adaptations of And Then There Were None and The Witness for the Prosecution, had her way with a number of aspects of Christie’s story. ![]() Is Calgary the real deal, another money-grubbing charlatan, or just plain crazy? All present have various opinions and various motives to believe them. He was Jack’s alibi for the night of the murder but went missing for the trial he’s come back to help clear Jack’s name. Arthur Calgary (Luke Treadaway: Fortitude) appears. Son Jack (Anthony Boyle) was fingered for whodunit, got packed off to prison, and met a sorry end at the hands of his fellow offenders.Īs the series opens 18 months later, the surviving Argylls are back at Sunny Point under various levels of duress to celebrate Leo’s impending marriage to the former family secretary, Gwenda (Alice Eve: Star Trek: Into Darkness), whose main contributions to the household appear to be rocking tight dresses and being shrewish toward everyone except Leo. Finally, someone bashed in Rachel’s skull. Family matriarch Rachel (Anna Chancellor: Shetland, Spooks/MI-5, The Hour, and so on) is an English Cruella de Vil, torturing her ineffectual husband Leo (Bill Nighy: Pirates of the Caribbean, and of course, Love Actually), her mixed bag of five adopted, now-grown children, and her long-suffering housekeeper Kristen (Morven Christie: Grantchester). There’s not a lot of sunshine at Sunny Point, the great house the Argylls haunt in the Scottish countryside, and it’s not because of the northern latitude-at least, not entirely. Now, the BBC has been releasing a series of high-gloss, new Christie productions for the telly, the latest being the three-part return visit with the Argyll family’s various demons now airing on Amazon Prime. This story of a badly behaved rich family eating its own spawned an all-star 1985 film adaptation and a 2007 TV version. It’s said that Dame Agatha named 1958’s Ordeal by Innocence as one of her two favorite novels ( Crooked House being the other), though she was known to change her answer to that particular question, as would any unreliable narrator. A country house, a dead body, a pack of suspects-sounds like Agatha Christie, no? Of course, it does. ![]()
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