Hallowe’en Party: Filmed as A Haunting in Venice (Poirot)

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Kenneth Branagh is one of the great filmmakers of our time. And he was meant to play Hercule Poirot. He may be the best to ever do it. And I must thank him. I have taken on reading every Agatha Christie novel that he has adapted for film here in the last few years. Miranda meets with Garfield, who takes her to a pagan sacrificial altar with the intention of poisoning her. However, he commits suicide when two youths recruited by Poirot save Miranda's life. Miranda reveals that she was the one who saw Garfield and Rowena drag Olga's body through the quarry garden, and she secretly told Joyce. Miranda had not been present at the preparations for the party, so Joyce tried to seek famous Ariadne's attention by claiming Miranda's story as her own. A Haunting in Venice is inspired by an Agatha Christie bool, but the differences are too big to call it an adaptation. Almost everything about the book is lovely. The writing shines, the characters are complex. Christie can paint a portrait in only a few sentences: “His friend, Mrs. Oliver, sounded in a highly excitable condition. Whatever was the matter with her, she would no doubt spend a very long time pouring out her grievances, her woes, her frustrations or whatever was ailing her…The things that excited Mrs. Oliver were so numerous and frequently so unexpected that one had to be careful how one embarked upon a discussion of them.”

Hildur Guønadøttir, the acclaimed composer from Iceland who won an Oscar, Golden Globe® and BAFTA for Joker and an Emmy® and GRAMMY® for Chernobyl, and who most recently scored Tár and Women Talking, composed the score. Within the walls of the Venice is that air of nightmarish uncomfortable feelings of legend, the areas that show the nightmares of old, but yet buffered by the safety of the modern world. No-one would deny that Kenneth Branagh is a talented man and, in the right role, is certainly a fine actor but he's no Olivier and he's certainly no Orson Welles but he seems to have the ego of both. He gave us a fine "Henry V" and then an elephantine, full-length "Hamlet" that almost put me off Shakespeare for life. Now it seems he's put the Bard to bed and decided that he's the best man to take on the mantle of Hercule Poirot but I forgot to mention that he's also no Ustinov, Finney or David Suchet. Every character, for the most part, has strong personality, collected balance, and works to make an incredible spectacle come to life. The trouble with you is,” said Mrs. Oliver…”the trouble with you is that you insist on being smart. You mind more about your clothes and your moustaches and how you look and what you wear than comfort. Now comfort is really the great thing. Once you’ve passed, say, fifty, comfort is the only thing that matters.”The first half of the novel contains several discussions in which anxiety is voiced about the criminal justice system in Great Britain. This in part reflects the abolition in 1965 of capital punishment for murder. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, came out in 1920. During her first marriage, Agatha published six novels, a collection of short stories, and a number of short stories in magazines. Yet, I look at the date of this novel—1969—and realize that perhaps one of my favorite mystery authors was simply getting tired of her characters and writing to meet a deadline. Perhaps she had used up all of her suspenseful endings and gripping characterizations. Granted, Curtain--a novel that ranks with her best works—was still to come, but I think this novel was part of the reason she was so ready to give Poirot his send-off. Everyone looked miserable and slightly embarrassed to be in this. I kinda wished it had camp appeal but everything played so serious and nothing about this was remotely unintentionally funny. Poirot muses that Rowena likely would have shared a similar fate to Olga, as Garfield's motivation for the murder was his obsession with constructing a second, more perfect garden. Once he had Rowena's money, he would soon have no more need of her, as she had already provided him with a Greek island.

As the readers, we have no doubt. Dame Agatha does not write murders without motives. So it would have been nice if at least a few of the characters Poirot interviewed could have had a distinct voice. Hallowe'en Party was released by HarperCollins as a graphic novel adaptation on 3 November 2008, adapted and illustrated by "Chandre" ( ISBN 0-00-728054-8). Hallowe'en Party was adapted for radio and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 30 October 1993, featuring John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot, with Stephanie Cole as Ariadne Oliver. [10] Television [ edit ] BritishMrs Llewellyn-Smythe placed her codicil in a book titled Enquire Within upon Everything, a real book of domestic tips published from 1856 to 1994. Lee, Amy (7 February 2003). Agatha Christie: Hallowe'en Party. The Literary Encyclopedia . Retrieved 13 April 2017. A one-time cleaner of Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe had been witness to her employer making the supposedly-forged codicil. In 1930, Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan (Sir Max from 1968) after joining him in an archaeological dig. Their marriage was especially happy in the early years and remained so until Christie's death in 1976. There aren't many other similarities between the stories. Co-written by Michael Green ( Logan), the script massively changes Christie's original tale, notably swapping the English countryside for a sinister Venetian palazzo.