This production did not get off to a promising start when, despite being set in 1954, a copy of the Racing Post, a publication not established until 1986, is dropped on the floor of the train.
The bizarre scene in the black community centre which focused on the negative aspects of colonialism in an attempt to insert current race politics into the narrative added nothing of value to the plot. In Fact, it only made it seem all the more implausible that in 1954 no-one bats an eyelid when a black man walks into their village and starts poking his nose into their affairs. Ditto the pub scenes. A thin premise is also contrived to shoehorn a couple of Asians in to the cast to tick another diversity box.
At one point a red kite is seen swooping on the main character which would have been impossible in the 1950s since these birds were virtually extinct in the UK at that time.
Death after death after death occurs in the village and none of the surviving villagers seem particularly bothered at all. In fact, the whole thing had the feel of a rather mediocre low budget amateur dramatic production which, while it lacked any real depth or substance, was certainly not short of garish colours for some reason. The actor playing Lord Whitfield in particular hammed the character up to a ridiculous level. The narrative was slow, tedious, completely lacking in suspense and punctuated with frequent lengthy silences which were presumably necessary to fill out the running time to the required 2 hours rather than the 45 minutes the salient elements of the rather weak script might have filled. It was a real shame that by far the best actor in the whole thing had her character killed off after only 8 minutes.
The person who wrote the screenplay for this, who has an almost unreadable foreign name, and the Indian director, clearly do not have any understanding of the sort of traditional English culture and customs that Agatha Christie's novels are steeped in. I am a huge fan of Christie's work but this has to be one of the worst adaptations I have yet seen.
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