Real Rating: 3.25* of five
I'll say more later, but whee dawggie did this rotten old bat's death fix the world!
***
LATER
One of Poirot's most arrogant cases, this one stems from a remark casually overheard by our snoopy sleuth: "You do see, don't you, that she's got to be killed?" spoken by American tourist Raymond Boynton to his sister Carol. The "she" in the sentence is their stepmother, an evil, sadistic harpy, as we learn later. Mrs. Boynton is a foul person whose abusive behavior towards her stepchildren is reminiscent of her premarital career as a prison warden. (Which is a whole other kettle of fish that, well, kudos to Dame Agatha for bringing it up no matter how tangentially.)
But the vile old bitch dies on a side trip from their holiday base in Jerusalem, at that time in the British Empire's control. While in a touring party, Mrs. Boynton and company meet Lady Westholme, charming English willful woman who was once an M.P. It is then, when La Westholme hoves into her view, that Mrs. Boynton utters a cryptic and menacing line: "I never forget. Remember that. I’ve never forgotten anything – not an action, not a name, not a face…."
The problem I have with this story is the cruelty of Mrs. Boynton to her family, her stepchildren and her own daughter (most inaptly named Ginevra, like any 1910s American mother would name her child such a foreign-sounding thing! Geneva, yes, but GINEVRA? Ha!), and the very, very dated "psychology" Christie lards into the tale via the French psychologist inexplicably on scene to explain why the Boynton woman has been able to keep control of these adults. Not to say it's badly written, really, though I do get a little tired of Ma Christie's use of foreigner-English. It's just that it's aged poorly and there is so damned *much* of it.
And Poirot's arrogance: He decides, after the dead woman is brought from Petra to his holiday destination visit to Col. Carbury, that by no more than interviewing the people in the holiday party he will solve the crime. But Mrs. Boynton wasn't, to all appearances, murdered...she just died of heart failure. But no, Poirot's little grey cells must be let out to run! Secrets must be revealed, The Truth must be discovered, and hang the consequences! (Which will, you know Poirot knows, be dire.)
Dire they are: More death (this time really unnecessary and quite horrible in its reason), a hideous boil of a family lanced and drained of a lifetime's accumulation of rotten, stinking emotional and physical abuse. Humiliation and misery for all! What a marvelous story to set in the so-called Holy Land, the source of millennia of misery, death, humiliation, and evil!
Can't fault Dame Ags for apt choices even if they aren't terribly subtle. And no one's going to convince me that they weren't both deliberate and calculated...too much evidence in her ouevre of her dislike for religion.
Agatha Christie's Poirot: Appointment with Death
Rating: 3.5* of five
Can't deal with child abuse, just can not. I also don't much enjoy the steady Catholicking of Poirot that Suchet began about this time, especially since this book was so bitterly anti-Catholic! He makes such a smug little speech to camera at the end of the show about Almighty God and I was ready to urp.
Now...about what survived...the awfulness of La Boynton, the identity and fate of the murderer, and several names. The major problem for me was that the child abuse was so well filmed, although one never sees the acts one does hear them, like the camera is one of the children not being tortured. It's effective.
TOO effective. I hated it.
The motives for the murder remaining the same, well, almost the same don't bother me. It's the nature of the beast in a murder mystery for the cracks to show. But the vileness of the victim and the condign death she endures don't make for easier watching. Families aren't safe, happy havens for all of us. But this family, its unique and terrible pathology, are ripe for fictional exploration. I don't think the screenplay does violence to the spirit of Nemesis that animates the book, that vengeful and dreadful goddess of retribution for the crime of hubris. In our secular age, that crime is no longer against the gods but against the Norm, the Way Things Should Be, ma'at. Lady Boynton, as she is in the show, has committed modern hubris on every conceivable subject: Her family's fate, her actions in the financial markets, her husband's bizarre search for the head of John the Baptist. Ah yes, that freshly invented husband: Played by the delight that is Tim Curry, he is a bluff'n'hearty old sod, obsessed with his Grail-quest to the exclusion of all other considerations...son, stepchildren, anything except the cash-cow of Lady Boynton and his digs for the damned white whale of a skull. It's a great pity that, after delivering a blistering character assessment of Poirot's need to furtle in the family linen-drawers, he essentially vanishes when his quest proves hollow. In the book, the same idea was served directly to Poirot by a now-disappeared character. The substance is the same: "can't you just leave it? She was evil, she's dead, let the living enjoy their lives at last."
Characters are invented, disappeared, renamed, repurposed; standard stuff, really, but the story...dreadful harpy rules all about her with great cruelty, gets come-uppance...remains. I rate it slightly higher than its book source material because it is very beautiful to look at. And Tim Curry, stout though he'd become by then, is still great fun to watch as he not so much chews but demolishes the scenery in his irrepressible aliveness.
I don't particularly recommend the story to you in either version. Child abuse is a crime, and now is punished as one. This is a societal change I approve of most heartily.