Screen:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
struck for our own national version of Socialist Realism. It close to the wrecked and abandoned automobile. remains somehow to be proven that "All the world's a stage Thus the deed is...
...She is not to be the victim in this mystery after all, elegant shawl she wears with her evening dress off her shoul- it seems...
...done in-but because it is the sort of thing that embarrasses Screen one in front of the servants...
...In a flight of pure fancy, Agatha one moment in the film which isn't lit in the characteristic turns something that actually happened in Dame Christie's Storaro manner is the one when the ball drops in the corner life-her unexplained disappearance for a number of days in pocket, the twist which suddenly causes the whole, convoluted 1926-into a story she herself might have written...
...The the plot of this movie as well...
...chibald (Timothy Dalton) is philandering with his secretary, The mystery that Agatha is trying to solve is of course not Agatha confronts him at the breakfast table and is told she is to Whodunnit?, but rather, Who was she, this famous yet elusive be thrown over...
...Get out," yells Archie, slamming the dining room door with one hand while trying to pull Agatha to her feet with the other...
...The cameraman on Agatha is Vittorio Storaro, have taken a divot out of the felt...
...She is rebound from this violent beginning and roll off vaguely as if of course Agatha Christie, the most famous mystery writer in Agatha were bungling her life...
...Redgrave puts her at just the real Agatha Christie's legendary shyness, and in subsequent disadvantage she needs to bring out Agatha's best qualities...
...The characters in an with her in both roles...
...Where she is flustered or reticient, he is candid and stroyed...
...For a man of verve and originality, he, together Soviet terminology of imperialism, colonialism, monopoly with his assistant, Suzanne Weaver, has written a surprisingly and exploitation to attack the West while overlooking the dull book...
...The effect is one of embattled, unfailing Fuming at another in a string of resolutions which sought to righteousness...
...BUT WHO WAS SHE...
...plays Agatha as the sort of woman who becomes terribly COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...She plays Agatha as a woman at once both tells, is still only a foil for the role of Agatha herself...
...uncovered...
...Having discovered that her husband Ar- metaphor-shock value...
...Smiling ever so discovers that the secretary is there, she begins to hatch a plot slightly, she re-addresses the ball...
...Where Agatha is retiring, Wally Stanton charm and magic atmosphere, would have been instantly de- is brash...
...Her the ball comes ambling down the table again, taking its own novels today are period pieces, enjoyable for their quaintness sweet time, and arrives back at the corner pocket with just the as much as their suspense...
...We watch with pleasurable incredulity as the plot ders...
...In the world which Agatha Christie's own characPHILIP TERZIAN ters inhabit, murder is a crime not because it breaks the law-we almost always feel the victim deserves to have been...
...He whispers something further, his secretary, who is now to come without him...
...traced her to this resort hotel where she is, among other things, And like the snooker ball, the plot of the movie seems to playing snooker with strangers under an assumed name...
...Like one of plot to make sense...
...the chalk on the bumper for her to aim at...
...Cheerfully at the center of big and little storms-some of his own applying a double standard, these countries often used the making...
...analysis, which he also sent to Secretary of State Henry KisCommonweal: 274...
...Once Agatha over the objections of one of the other players...
...enters carrying the breakfast tea...
...He does this to disencumber her arms, which she now follows a route as circuitous as any Dame Christie herself holds as if they were embarrassed to be caught naked...
...The commotion of this AS AGATHA (Vanessa Redgrave) is about to attempt a scene followed by the car crash starts Agatha on its way with shot, Wally Stanton (Dustin Hoffman) enters the the same, smart jolt that its central character delivers to her snooker room...
...Thus Agatha becomes the one thing an Agatha Christie story are ordinarily forthright, willful and Agatha Christie story never is: a character study...
...Whether the result is surface of the public figure the personality of a girl who has the real Agatha Christie is impossible to say...
...The clues are in the direction, though, more than moment she may end sprawled on the table...
...If Apted is trying to turn her life into right amount of momentum to drop neatly in...
...Read three of four years later, it can be heavy 1971 General Assembly, cabled to congratulate John Scali for going...
...After all, anything...
...scenes Ms...
...One can only grown too quickly and now feels rangy and awkward...
...Redgrave keeps visible just beneath the cially, Vanessa Redgrave had to imagine...
...Redgrave translates this into an almost physical But Hoffman's role, while it is key to the fanciful story Agatha vulnerability...
...the bumper and goes wandering crazily up toward the other This is what he does here, imparting a lush romanticism to the end of the table, the other players are too taken aback to say many mist-filtered, window-lit scenes in Agatha...
...Agatha's director Michael Apted and writers Kathleen Tynan and Arthur Hopcraft carefully surround Agatha's break with her husband in the movie with much the same atmosphere...
...That The movie's opening scene is intended to remind us of the Hoffman is too short for Ms...
...such superficialities...
...RICHARD C. HOTTELET new majority wanted to vote itself a redistribution of the wealth and political power held by the West and thought it I IN HIS BRIEF TIME at the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was could do best in association with the Soviet Union...
...And one man in his time plays many parts...
...Just as Agatha goes completely to MISSING MISS CHRISTIE pieces and falls to the floor clutching Archie's legs, a servant NOT WHODUNNTT...
...suppression of political freedom and human rights in the Too much of A Dangerous Place (Atlantic, Little, Brown, Communist camp, not to mention the Soviets' failure to pro$12.50, 297 pp) is Moynihan quoting his articles, speeches, vide them with any real economic help, apart from a few large, memoranda, the UN record, the views of friends and news- token projects...
...But then the plot begins to double lier after a car crash near her home...
...Fearless and unswerving pursuit of justice becomes a vigorously opposing the new effort...
...His portrayal is a struggle of good against evil, brand Puerto Rico as colonial territory, to be "liberated" by light against darkness with overtones of Armageddon and the UN, Moynihan, who had been in the US delegation to the apocalypse...
...Distraught, she leaves home in her car that woman-what was she really like...
...But Apted has a further motive which plot of one of Agatha Christie's own mysteries, and very like doesn't become apparent until the very end of the film...
...Certainly she must the writing...
...We are used to sympathiznight, but crashes into a tree nearby...
...But then, to the even greater amazement of us all, Christie's own writing is part of the romance of the 1920s...
...remains somehow to be proven that "All the world's a stage Thus the deed is done, the mystery in need of solving...
...They complement each other...
...might have concocted, and then drops surprisingly into the He steps around to the adjacent side of the table and places corner pocket...
...The way she goes to that resort, the world, who has mysteriously disappeared some days ear- she seems to be in a daze...
...What finally has to sustain Agatha beyond the inven- bold...
...Storaro is distinctive missed the shot, which was at a slight angle to the corner for his ability to work in very low natural light and to achieve pocket but looked, nonetheless, direct...
...She trust that the real Agatha was someone as winning as this...
...Their personalities fit tiveness of the plot and the effects is acting, and this Vanessa together in a comic, human way, like the postures of a slouchy Redgrave provides...
...paper clippings...
...WITH WHICH I SAT . . . AND LISTENED TO THE Moynihan came to the UN in the spring of 1975, having STALINIST SON OF A BITCH FROM CUBA GO ON written, toward the end of his term as Ambassador to India, a ABOUT PUERTO RICO Moynihan's conclusion was, biting critique of the United States' posture in the United "TO HELL WITH IT...
...yet she turns out to be could fix a character forever with a single detail or gesture, and more determined than the most single-minded murderess for years she sustained one character- Poirot- on nothing but Dame Christie could have imagined...
...In his longer, more judicious correspondent for CBS News...
...He noted that the SHOULD HAPPEN TO EACH ONE [of the countries which change in the UN membership after 1960 to a majority of vote for such resolutions or abstain] AND WHEN IT HAS newly independent states had altered attitude, and practice...
...The next thing we know, ing with the murderer and disliking the victim in a Christie she is on a train somewhere and the police are dragging a marsh story, but Agatha makes it a bit more complicated than that 11 May 1979: 273 because Agatha herself is both the victim and the self-conscious about her knees every time she sits down be"criminal" -first the one, then the other- and we sympathize cause they always stick up above her lap...
...one of her own mysteries, it's only fitting he should give it the The course described by that snooker ball is very like the right atmosphere...
...As she addresses the ball, back toward the corner pocket again when we learn it was in Stanton walks over and, without benefit of introduction, whis- this very resort that Archie planned to spend the weekend with pers in her ear...
...And she has-obviously who has done all of Bertolucci's films...
...Dame Chris- sharply defined...
...As the ball caroms off the effects of "Rembrandt" lighting with color film stock...
...He is an American journalist who has snooker ball...
...Redgrave's performance into relief and or passion or some other genuine complexity of character had makes us feel its exquisiteness is the counterpoint performance ever entered the world she created, that world, with all its by Dustin Hoffman...
...She then strokes the Every good Agatha Christie ends with a twist, and this one is ball with such abruptness and ferocity that we fear for a no exception...
...But if someone truly given to self-doubt What throws Ms...
...SPEAKING LOUDLY & CARRYING A SMALL STICK Our man at the U.N...
...Apted has retained Storaro's Rembrandt her own mysteries, Agatha begins with a bump, with an light up until that moment so that the harsh, white arc light of unexpected lurch, a violent breach in the decorum of upper- the moment itself will have-to use the appropriate class English life...
...The HAPPENED THEY SHOULD BE TOLD THAT AMERICANS TAKE THE HONOR OF THEIR DEMOCRACY RICHARD C. HOTTELET, a previous contributor, is United Nations MOST SERIOUSLY...
...SOMETHING SPECIFICALLY BAD Nations for the magazine Commentary...
...She uncertain, impulsive, at loose ends...
...It is her ungainly and beautiful-a woman whose ungainliness makes behavior that Tynan, Hopcraft, Storaro, Apted and, espeher beautiful...
...Stanton discreetly pulls the of her own...
...She hesitates...
...By contrast the Agatha in the movie seems tie was perhaps the greatest stereotyper in all literature...
...woman and a barrel-chested man on a dance floor...
...He recalled "THE FURY public figure, but too much of it makes a man a monument...
Vol. 106 • May 1979 • No. 9
