Penny Gold - 1973 film review

Penny Gold, a British crime film first released in 1973, has a number of things going for it, in particular a very good cast. It's led by James Booth, best known for his role in Zulu, but really a compelling and rather sardonic actor whom I enjoy watching. And then there is Francesca Annis, who has long been one of my favourite actors. A good supporting cast includes Nicky Henson, Joss Ackland (so good in White Mischief) and - in a minor part, before she became well-known - Penelope Keith, playing a model. Una Stubbs, Sue Lloyd, and John Savident also appear.

The film opens with the murder of a young woman,and before long the cops, in the person of Booth and Henson are on the scene. One striking feature of their handling of the investigation is the occasionally aggressive approach of Booth in particular - this was, of course, the era of The Sweeney. It must have seemed very modern at the time, but is rather disturbing now.

The storyline is quite complicated. It involves identical twins (yes, that old stand-by!), a rare postage stamp, and more than one murder. Although they sometimes take a predictable course, I find stories about twins rather interesting. I've never written one myself, but maybe one of these days. Here the presence of twins in the story is - foreseeably - significant.

The screenplay was written by David Osborn and Liz Charles-Williams, both of whom had a number of crime scripts to their credit. But I'm afraid that the screenplay is what lets the film down. The use of flashbacks is clunky, and so are some of the plot devices, along with too much of the dialogue. There is a good idea lurking here, but on the whole, Penny Gold doesn't make the most of its talented cast...

P.S. - Thanks for bearing with me during various tricky moments with this blog and my webisite over the last couple of days. Special thanks to Fiona and Zach for alerting me to those issues. I feared Russian hackers were to blame, but the explanation proved to be more prosaic...

Partners in Crime - The Secret Adversary- BBC TV review

Partners in Crime, a new BBC series featuring Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, kicked off tonight with part one of The Secret Adversary, a thriller that was really quite a departure from her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Christie gave the title Partners in Crime to a collection of short stories written during the Twenties in which the Beresfords ran a detective agency and amused themselves by aping the methods of famous fictional sleuths.

Back in the Eighties, the Partners in Crime series was televised, and although some of the short stories are a little thin, Francesca Annis and James Warwick did a very good job as Tuppence and Tommy. So in theory the first question to ask about the new show is: how well did Jessica Raine and David Walliams do playing the same characters?

I suppose the real answer is that they are barely the same characters. The BBC hired Zinnie Harris, an accomplished mainstream playwright, to write the script, and I get the impression that she set herself the challenge of writing something as different from the original as was possible. Not just updating the story thirty years to the Cold War era, but introducing a touch of raunchiness and a scene in which a bumbling Tommy finds himself visiting a peep-show while on the trail of some bad guys.

Agatha Christie it ain't - the mystery element is pretty thin so far, as well - but it made for light and undemanding Sunday evening viewing. Not bad, and at times quite amusing, but definitely not for the purists. I'm fairly open-minded about this sort of thing, as I remind myself that I was introduced to Christie as a child through my enjoyment of a Miss Marple film based on a book that actually featured Poirot. To this day,I'm a huge Christie fan, but I'll approach future episodes with the intention of trying to forget the source material for the time being. Comparisons are pointless. 

Francesca Annis, then and now

The Little House concluded on Monday evening, with a stand-out performance from Francesca Annis as the mother-in-law from hell. I thought this was quite a good suspense story, made all the more watchable by Annis. But the action fizzled out somewhat, and I was left at the end asking myself: 'Is that it?'

I’ve also just seen Annis in an episode from Partners in Crime, playing Tuppence Beresford in Agatha Christie’s story The Crackler. This programme dates back to 1982, but again she is the outstanding performer, lifting relatively mundane material to a higher level by the sheer exuberance of her acting.

In The Crackler, Christie parodied the work of Edgar Wallace. The Beresfords are asked by Scotland Yard to help to uncover the truth behind a forgery scam, and they infiltrate the high class, yet murky, Python Club to do so. Tommy is vamped by a Frenchwoman, played by Carolle Rousseau. Rousseau, like Annis, is extremely attractive, but an internet search suggests she did not do much acting after this show.

Whereas Annis has gone from strength to strength, not least in The Little House. I hope that excellent roles for characters of her age continue to be written – they should be. Incidentally, many years ago, my own mother-in-law (who died very young and whom, sadly, I never met) taught Annis for a while. Apparently, her brilliance was evident even at a tender age. As The Little House shows, she continues to be brilliant.

The Little House - review

The Little House, which started on ITV this evening, is based on a Phillipa Gregory novel that I wasn’t aware of, but which appears to date back to the late 90s. I was drawn to watch it by a cast that includes Francesca Annis and Tim Pigott-Smith, and wasn’t I glad I did.

It’s a psychological suspense story, involving a young married couple and the husband’s charming but perhaps oppressive parents, played by Annis and Pigott-Smith. The wife, played by Lucy Griffiths, is a teacher, who is trying to understand a mystery from her own past.

When she falls pregnant, she is persuaded – against her will – to keep the baby and put on hold plans to research her past. Her husband also persuades her to accept an offer of a lovely home. This is the eponymous little house; the setting is wonderful, but the snag is that it’s right next door to her in-laws.

Once the baby is born, he appears more at ease with his grandma than his mother, and by the end of the episode it was plain that Annis, having packed her daughter-in-law off to a clinic, would be quite happy to be rid of her on a permanent basis. Annis is always excellent, I think, and here she shows a menacing side beneath the surface charm. A good story - and good enough to warrant a blog post I hadn’t planned to write!

The Man in the Mist

I’ve watched another in the Partners in Crime series from the 80s, featuring Francesca Annis and James Warwick as Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. This episode was 'The Man in the Mist', and involved the murder of an actress who is about to marry and is seeking a divorce from a reluctant husband.

The idea of the original stories which formed Partners in Crime was that Agatha Christie would conceive a mystery in the style of a popular whodunit writer of the 1920s, and Tommy and/or Tuppence would, in effect, detect in the manner of the writer’s sleuthing hero. It was a clever idea, and as far as I know has never been done in quite the same way before or since (if I’m mistaken on this, please don’t hesitate to point it out – I’m aware of plenty of mystery parodies, such as Gory Knight, but not an extensive series of linked stories forming a single book in the manner of Partners n Crime.)

In this particular story, Tommy takes on the role of G.K.Chesterton’s legendary Father Brown, and spends the episode dressed improbably as the little priest. He also leads a re-enactment of the circumstances surrounding the crime which help to reveal how it was done.

This was an enjoyable episode. It’s very light entertainment indeed, comfort viewing if you like, but done very well. Of course, the plot has limitations, but I enjoyed it. And the verve with which Annis and Warwick play their parts is central to the pleasure.

The Ambassador's Boots

A while back, in posting about The Secret Adversary featuring Francesca Annis and James Warwick as Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, I enquired about the TV series Partners in Crime, in which the duo starred. Happily, ITV 3 has been screening some episodes from that series, and (once I realised) I managed to record some of them.

The first that I’ve seen is ‘The Ambassador’s Boots’. This is a story with a nice central idea, somehow typical of Christie. An ambassador’s boots are taken, but then returned. What can this signify?

The mystery is put to Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, who are running a detective agency, and they investigate with their customary enthusiasm. Annis and Warwick really did work very well together, splendid piece of casting. The ambassador has a mysterious valet, who commits suicide, and an advert placed by the Beresfords in a newspaper attracts a prompt response from a helpful young woman – whose story is interrupted by an unlikely foreign villain armed with a gun. When I say that the Beresfords’ young assistant Albert rescues them by capturing the foreign chap with a lasso, you will gather that the mood is insistently light-hearted, but the programme is none the worse for that.

The supporting cast in this hour-long episode was excellent. T.P. McKenna played the ambassador, Clive Merrison (known in recent times for his radio portrayal of Sherlock Holmes) was the valet, and Jennie Linden (best known as Ursula in the film of Women in Love) the helpful young woman.

The Secret Adversary

Very belatedly indeed, I have just watched the television adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, first screened as long ago as 1983. The book itself was Christie’s second, a light-hearted thriller, and it’s safe to say that it would now be pretty obscure had its author not proceeded to write some of the finest of all whodunits. The plot has its ludicrous moments, but it’s a very lively story with likeable protagonists, and the adaptation by Pat Sandys played to these strengths, as well as treating us to some sumptuous photography.

This was the story which introduced Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley, who went on to marry, and cropped up occasionally in Christie stories for the rest of her career. Here, just after the First World War, they are at a loose end and in search of adventure. Tommy overheard a conversation about someone called Jane Finn (overheard conversations were to become a Christie trademark) and events move rapidly from there, as they become unofficial secret service agents and set off on the track of a missing treaty that, if it falls into the wrong hands, may lead to a general strike and the overthrow of the government.

The producers cast two very good-looking actors as Tommy and Tuppence – James Warwick and Francesca Annis. Francesca Annis in particular performs her role with gusto: she really is one of my favourite tv stars. This pair later starred in a series based on the linked short stories featuring Tommy and Tuppence, Partners in Crime, which again I did not see at the time. My question to any of you who did watch it is: was it any good?

The supporting cast was excellent, including Peter Barkworth doing his usual reliable Englishman as the secret service supreme, Mr Carter, Toria Fuller (who seems to have ended her screen career prematurely, according to a quick search I made on the internet), and Alec McCowen. Oh, and George Baker plays a bad guy – yes, our own Inspector Wexford, who earlier in his career quite often took villainous roles that would be almost unthinkable today! All in all, this show was pleasant entertainment, and the twists in the story-line do give at least a hint of the skills that Christie went on to develop with such extraordinary single-mindedness.

Winston Graham

In the 1970s, the hugely popular television series ‘Poldark’ made Winston Graham’s name very well known. I never got into ‘Poldark’, a historical saga set in Cornwall (even though I thought Angharad Rees, one of the stars, was truly lovely) and I was never tempted to read the books. Not until some years later did I discover that, before he turned to swashbucklers, Graham was a highly accomplished writer of crime fiction.

Successful, too. He wrote the book on which Hitchcock based that interesting movie ‘Marnie’, starring Sean Connery, and also the story that sourced ‘The Walking Stick’, a quirky thriller boasting another starry cast that included the late David Hemmings, Samantha Eggar and Francesca Annis. I rather like both films.

And there is more. Winston Graham was the very first winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1955, for The Little Walls. (In fact, in those days, the award rejoiced in the name of the Crossed Red Herrings Award. It changes name from time to time, having recently been the Duncan Lawrie Dagger an expediency to reflect the short-lived sponsorship of a bank, but the Dagger name changes are irritating; to my mind the Gold Dagger is the right title for the award for best crime novel of the year.)

So I decided it was high time to read a bit of Winston Graham. And thanks to eBay, I now have a decent and modestly priced haul of his paperbacks.