Scorned by the police and nursing a secret pain, the latent violence in Malkovich’s performance is as potent as ever
My husband and I married across many divides – class, political, minimal personal hygiene levels – but nothing separates us so firmly as our attitudes to Poirot. And by Poirot I mean the bespoke-padded, neatly-pomaded form of David Suchet, who dominated the Christie cultural landscape for a quarter of a century. From the moment he smoothed down his moustache and sallied primly forth as the Belgian detective in 1989 in the first of what would become 70 episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, to devote himself to the solving of mysteries in Art Deco properties across the land, he simply was Hercule. There could be no other. Nor – for lo, these last five years since the series ended – has anyone on TV dared to try.
I did understand that it was A Quality Affair but I just couldn’t bear it. The mannered carefulness. The determined retention of the worst aspect of Christie – the constant feeling of cipher-characters being moved into place by an all-knowing hand, like chess pieces with Marcel waves and costume jewellery. My husband, by way of relations-severing contrast, loves it for precisely this.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2GIMteR
Comments
Post a Comment