Page 100 →EightChristie’s Murders at the Movies … and Why She Disliked Them

With such films as Kansas City Bomber (1972), Gable and Lombard (1976), and The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976) to his credit, screenwriter Barry Sandler established his name in the 1970s as one of Hollywood’s fresher and more prolific talents. His place in Hollywood history is assured owing to his screenplay for Making Love (1982), the first major studio release depicting a gay romance, and he achieved another career highlight in the 1980s with Crimes of Passion (1984), an erotic thriller that features Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins in memorably committed performances and is today recognized as one of director Ken Russell’s most daring and engrossing films. Among the other milestones of his career, Sandler transformed Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d (1980) into a campy gem through his gleefully decadent screenplay. Following the success of the 1970s blockbuster adaptations of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, and with similar over-the-top Hollywood panache, the film adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d features an all-star cast, notably Angela Lansbury as Christie’s beloved detective Miss Marple, along with Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Kim Novak, and other celebrities. Director Guy Hamilton, who is best remembered for his work on the James Bond franchise, including Goldfinger (1964), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973), and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), joined this talented screenwriter and these big stars. With this pedigree, The Mirror Crack’d promised a familiar formula of cinematic adaptation from the 1970s yet one that Sandler leavened with unexpected camp pleasures.

Within cinema’s collaborative milieu, screenwriters seeking a camp effect face the challenge of achieving their humorous vision through the coordinated efforts of the director, actors, and other professionals creatively contributing to the film’s production. Given these conditions, The Mirror Crack’d illustrates the potential and pitfalls of queer adaptation, particularly when the director’s vision fails to align with the screenwriter’s. Within the ambit of this chapter, the term queer adaptation refers to any of the variety of ways in which a source text is repurposed for another medium while highlighting the expression of transgressive desires, whether those desires are grounded in the erotic, aesthetic, or another field. In so doing, a queer adaptation might accelerate or contain the queerness depicted in its source. Acceleration and containment are exemplified respectively by Frank Perry’s over-the-top staging of Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest (memoir 1978; film 1981), which transmutes the horrors of child abuse into campy hysterics, and Steven Spielberg’s restrained staging of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (novel 1982; film 1985), which cloaks the lesbianism at Page 107 →the novel’s heart. Balancing this binary, certain queer adaptations aim for fidelity —an admittedly conflicted term in adaptation studies but one that appears appropriate for such films as James Ivory’s version of E. M. Forster’s Maurice (novel written 1913–14 and published 1971; film 1987) and Ang Lee’s version of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain (short story 1997; film 2005).

At first glance, Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d would not appear a particularly apt vehicle for camp humor, as it follows the traditional parameters of the murder mystery, and so Sandler’s rollicking adaptation belongs firmly to the accelerative mode of queer adaptation. Susan Sontag famously defined camp as “a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.”¹² She further suggests: “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’”¹³ Camp often begins with parody, yet as Moe Meyer proposes, “Camp emerges as specifically queer parody possessing cultural and ideological analytic potential…. Parody becomes the process whereby the marginalized and disenfranchised advance their own interests.”¹⁴ With this form of queer parody, camp enables artists to speak back to dominant forms of discourse, even in such genres as detective fiction that might be assumed to be escapist fare. Of key importance in understanding the ways in which camp functions in The Mirror Crack’d is the way in which subversive humor builds queer communities, as Philip Core argues: “Besides being a signal, camp was and remains the way in which homosexuals and other groups of people with double lives can find a lingua franca.”¹⁵ For screenwriters, the challenges of camp are magnified in that they can parody existing cultural artifacts and pen camp dialogue but cannot ensure camp stagings and camp performances to capture their vision. That is to say, queer screenwriters can never ensure that Hollywood’s power structures—most clearly enforced by the producers bankrolling the project and the directors controlling its filming—will respect their artistic vision and instead seek to normalize any transgressive pleasures they aspire to introduce.

On his way to creating a camp gem, Sandler was confronted with a decidedly non-campy, if at times genially amusing, source text in The Mirror Crack’d. In Christie’s novel (and with these storylines followed in the film), victim Heather Badcock dies at a reception hosted by actress Marina Gregg (Elizabeth Taylor), but investigators soon become convinced that Marina was the killer’s intended target. Sidelined by the infirmities of age, Miss Marple (Angela Lansbury) relies on her nephew, Inspector Craddock (Edward Fox), to keep her apprised of the investigation’s progress as he interviews the many suspects. (As Sandler avers, this stricture limits the film’s narrative action: “Miss Marple can’t launch an investigation; she has to do it through [Craddock’s] investigation.” Given these conditions, Sandler says that he was “kind of saddled with that; it’s hard to make Page 108 →her an active heroine.”) Craddock pursues his investigation by interrogating the prime suspects, including Marina’s husband Jason Rudd (Rock Hudson); Jason’s infatuated secretary Ella Zielinsky (Geraldine Chaplin); Marina’s former romantic rival Lola Brewster (Kim Novak); and producer Ardwyck Fenn, renamed Martin N. Fenn in the film (Tony Curtis). Through her keen attention to detail and her powers of deduction, Miss Marple solves the crime. Following a chance encounter many years ago, Heather infected Marina with German measles while she was pregnant, resulting in her child being born with severe intellectual disabilities. Stunned to meet the woman who precipitated such emotional agony, Marina poisons her own drink, surreptitiously jogs Heather’s elbow, and then insists that Heather take her drink, with the victim expiring soon after.

The film version of The Mirror Crack’d adheres to the basic trajectory of Christie’s plot, which, as Sandler declares, was required by the film’s licensing agreement: “according to the terms of the Christie estate, you had to stick to the exact plot; you couldn’t change the killer or suspects.” Expanding on this point, Sandler mentions the filmmakers were granted a degree of artistic license in that they “could create new dialogue and conflicts, [and] could change settings.”¹⁶ Along with any such contractual requirements, cinematic adaptations frequently must streamline their source narrative due to film’s standard temporal parameters of roughly ninety minutes to two hours. In light of these constraints, several peripheral characters were omitted, including Miss Knight, Miss Marple’s officious and annoying companion assisting her during her convalescence; Arthur Badcock, Heather Badcock’s husband and Marina Gregg’s first husband; Hailey Preston, Jason Rudd’s assistant; and Dr. Gilchrist, Marina’s physician. Margot Bence remains in the film as the photographer who captures the shot of Marina standing frozen while Heather Badcock prattles but loses her status as a suspect. The plotline concerning Marina’s adopted and then abandoned children, of whom Margot is one, is mentioned briefly yet remains undeveloped as a potential motive. Numerous other minor changes could be mentioned, but more significant than any shift in the plotline is Sandler’s campy shift in tone and dialogue, resulting in a film illustrating the humorous possibilities of queer adaptation.

Comedy provides a critical means for screenwriters to energize the pacing of a murder mystery that might otherwise consist mainly of a series of interviews. As Philip Jenkinson notes: “[many] Agatha Christie adaptations have attempted to up-date their material with humour.”¹⁷ Death on the Nile illustrates this practice, with Christie’s novel enlivened by Bette Davis and Maggie Smith’s petty bickering in their roles as Mrs. Van Schuyler and Miss Bowers, not to mention the image of young Egyptian boys mooning Bette Davis / Mrs. Van Schuyler as she serenely sits on the boat’s deck observing the view. At the same time, the Page 109 →interjection of humor into a murder mystery can undercut its rising tension, and some adaptations of Christie’s works have been snubbed for attempting this admixture of tones, such as in Wolcott Gibbs’s review of the theatrical adaptation of And Then There Were None: “the humor that has been inserted is always broad and often has a tendency to defeat the author’s sinister intent.”¹⁸

Christie infuses The Mirror Crack’d with several moments of wry humor, in a manner consistent with her interest in the comedy of manners tradition. The culture clash between the rural residents of St. Mary Mead and the cosmopolitan filmmakers establishes an underlying comic tenor to the novel, as do Miss Marple’s skirmishes with her companion Miss Knight, such as when the latter suggests that she will make Miss Marple a “nice eggnog” and pedantically prompts, “We’d like that, wouldn’t we?” Miss Marple demurely replies with sweet yet arch irony: “I don’t know whether you would like it…. I should be delighted for you to have it if you would like it” (168; italics in the original). This central ingredient of humor in the Christie canon, both in its literary and cinematic incarnations, was notably absent in the first draft of the screenplay for The Mirror Crack’d, which was penned by British writer Jonathan Hales. Hales achieved notable success in the 1970s with such television programs as Manhunt and The Guardians; his most commercial triumph came later in his career with Star Wars: Episode 2—Attack of the Clones (2002). As is common with Hollywood screenwriting, although Hales and Sandler share a screen credit, they did not collaborate on the project. Sandler explains: “The script wasn’t quite working,” and so “the producers wanted an American writer to modernize it.” He further observes: “Hales’s script was very British, and the Americans were subsidiary characters. They had no life, no color, and so I wanted to give it a bitchier sensibility. The producers said, ‘Great! Go for it!’” And go for it, he did, with great gusto.

Although Christie’s humor does not fall within the purview of camp, nor does the humor of most of the adaptations of her work, she evinces a keen interest in theatricality, with the exaggerations of this trope conducive to camp humor. R. A. York comments: “Theatricality is in fact one of the basic concerns and one of the basic mechanisms of the Christie novels,” noting further that “many of the central characters in her novels are professional actors.”¹⁹ Because they are adept at assuming roles and feigning emotions, actors frequently appear as suspects in Christie’s cast of characters, and her murderers must by necessity hone their skills in dissembling—until they are revealed as the killers. Significantly, many of Christie’s actors appear as larger-than-life figures who claim the attention of all bystanders through their sheer magnetism, such as in the description of the victim of Murder in Mesopotamia: “Mrs. Leidner was a bit of a film star in private life. She had to be the center of things—in the limelight” (118–19). In Evil Under the Sun, Arlena Stuart Marshall similarly stuns the attention of all Page 110 →onlookers: “Her arrival had all the importance of a stage entrance. Moreover, she walked as though she knew it” (10); another character comments of her, “It’s IT, my boy … That’s what it is—IT” (12), referring to that ineffable feature of charismatic celebrity. With a formulation readily applicable to Marina Gregg, Merja Makinen affirms: “The type of the Hollywood actress comes to stand for self-absorbed egotism in Christie’s work.”²⁰ “Self-absorbed egotism” is also the hallmark of divas and drag queens in the exaggerated theatricality that stands as camp’s hallmark. This is not to suggest that Sandler transforms Elizabeth Taylor into a drag queen in her role—although the excessive performance of gender allows such a reading—but that he exploited the big egos and bigger insecurities rampant in the entertainment industry for the deep humor of shallow behavior.

In accentuating Christie’s interest in Hollywood, film, and performativity throughout The Mirror Crack’d, Sandler highlights recurring themes in Christie’s corpus, which he further imbues with camp humor. The film begins with a parody of the murder mystery genre, both in its novelistic and cinematic incarnations, in order simultaneously to pay homage to and to subvert the genre’s foundations. A story filmed in black and white unfolds on the screen, with the establishing shot of an English manor house accompanied by the sound of thunder cracking to create the effect of a (clichéd) “dark and stormy night.” As the camera moves inside, viewers observe the (clichéd) butler greeting the (clichéd) detective clad in a (clichéd and obviously inspired by Sherlock Holmes) tweed coat. The detective enters the drawing room and (clichéd) dialogue ensues. Mr. Montrose, one of the suspects in the murder of Lord Fenley, protests, “Inspector, you’re not trying to imply that one of us could have actually performed such a loathsome deed?” to which the Inspector gravely replies, “Not only do I believe it, Mr. Montrose, but I have the evidence to prove it. All of you had sufficient motive. It could have been … any one of you.” The Inspector then expostulates at length upon the various suspects and their potential (and convoluted) motives for the murder as he leads up to this scene’s final cliché: the grand reveal of the murderer’s identity. “Very well, then,” the Inspector declares, “Lord Fenley’s murderer … ” A broken projector ends this film within a film, and it is here that the purposeful clichés of The Mirror Crack’d end as well. This film that viewers might have presumed they are watching is revealed to be a macguffin, a distraction entitled Murder at Midnight rather than the titular film itself and one that Miss Marple breezily solves for her fellow audience members. As Sandler details, “the opening scene establishes Marple as the heroine,” for she sees through the tropes of the mystery genre that Sandler exposes so that he may then supersede them as the film progresses. Later in the film, Jason Rudd tells Inspector Craddock, “You’ve been seeing too many Charlie Chan movies, Inspector”—another sure sign that Sandler knows the tropes of the murder mystery genre and deploys them atypically and, ultimately, to camp ends.

Page 111 →A key trope of camp humor is simultaneously to revel in and to strip away the facades of art and performance. As Richard Dyer suggests: “Camp, by drawing attention to the artifices employed by artists, can constantly remind us that what we are seeing is only a view of life. This doesn’t stop us enjoying it, but it does stop us believing too readily everything we are shown.”²¹ In Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d, readers are informed of Marina’s and Lola’s shared occupation as actresses, but the novel does not thematize the artifice of performance to take advantage of the duplicities arising from their rivalry. In contrast, Sandler sets much of the film directly in the cinematic world better to exploit the humor of Hollywood egos invading the small English village of St. Mary Mead. Sandler’s Miss Marple echoes Dyer’s viewpoint in her assessment of the cinematic world: “I read not too long ago about Hollywood: ‘Underneath all that phony tinsel lies the real tinsel.’” Her words provide a suitable theme for the film as a whole, for Sandler creates the film’s “real tinsel”—its humor—underneath the standard plotline of a Christie mystery novel. This delight in artifice emerges as well in various characters’ constructions of themselves for public consumption. When producer Martin N. Fenn is asked what his middle initial stands for, he puffily replies: “I’ll tell you what it stands for. Nothing. But it sure looks great on that big silver screen, doesn’t it?” In a camp world, artifice is the only reality that matters.

Camp pleasures abound in the pitched battles between Marina and Lola, a plot point that supplies the film version of The Mirror Crack’d with its wittiest, bitchiest dialogue. While forcing smiles for a photographer, the two actresses spar, with Marina drawing first blood: “What are you supposed to be, a birthday cake? Too bad everybody’s had a piece.” As the photographer requests, “Can we have a big smile, ladies?” Lola obliges, as she also coolly counterattacks: “Chin up, darling. Both of them.” The photographer then encourages the women, “A little bit closer, please, ladies,” and Marina prepares her enemy for the coup de grace: “Lola, dear, you know there really are only two things I dislike about you.” Taking the bait, Lola queries, “Really? What are they?” Marina graciously snarls: “Your face.” Wearing big hats, standing in contrasting costuming of pink and purple, and plastering on wearied smiles, Taylor and Novak play their catfight with steely determination and cutting humor (see figure 1). As Sandler recalls, although Taylor and Novak did not share any longstanding animosity, a slight professional rivalry arose over staging because Novak expressed concerned that Taylor was receiving more flattering framing from the key lighting. The director of photography assuaged Novak’s concerns, consoling her that Taylor “needs it more than you do.” While such a behind-the-scenes anecdote may appear inconsequential to a reading of the resulting film, it highlights the Hollywood duplicities and humor that Sandler sought to bring to the screen. In many ways, Hollywood cannot help but be camp.

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Kim Novak and Elizabeth Taylor smile for the cameras while exchanging cutting insults, with the duality between surface expression and actual sentiment creating a masterful camp staging.

Within Sandler’s camp reimagining of the characters, it is not only Marina and Lola who are reimagined as bitchy divas. Ella Zielinsky stands as a rather unremarkable character in Christie’s novel, with her primary narrative purpose emerging when she is murdered for blackmailing the killer. In Sandler’s hands, Ella blossoms through the addition of her biting, acerbic commentary on the Hollywood divas surrounding her. Commenting on Marina’s overuse of sleeping pills, she dryly declares, “You shake her, she rattles.” Upon observing the impending conflict between Marina and Lola, she resignedly sighs: “Uh-oh. Mary Queen of Sluts and Baby Bernhardt under the same roof. That’s all we need.” When discussing these actresses with producer Marty Fenn, she pointedly reminds him of their mutual enmity: “Remember, they used to grind glass in each other’s cold cream.” Her assessment of Fenn likewise reveals a woman exhausted by the duplicities of her workplace—“Marty Fenn is a producer. He only lies when he speaks”—yet capable of transmuting the dross of others’ egotism into comic pleasures.

Camp, a larger-than-life style, benefits from larger-than-life performances. In short, the true camp artist is the biggest ham, and the script of The Mirror Crack’d offers its stars numerous opportunities to exaggerate their characters into campy caricatures. In an appropriately over-the-top performance, Tony Curtis delivers such memorable lines as “Of course I’m a bastard. I’m the producer!” When the local vicar, bewildered by the intricacies of filmmaking, wonders aloud, “But who chooses the leading lady?” Curtis deadpans, “Whoever’s sleeping with her.” He also generously offers to demystify the cinematic world for the vicar: “What would you like to know, Vicar, baby?” In her performance as Lola Brewster, Kim Novak plays the egomaniacal diva, virtually puffing up in each scene to accentuate the character’s excessive glamour and unbridled ego. Page 113 →Concerned about her hairstyle for the film, Fenn reminds her, “Queen Elizabeth was bald,” to which she snappily replies, “Not in this movie, she ain’t.” She snipes at Jason Rudd’s last directorial effort: “I could eat a can of Kodak and puke a better movie.” Great actors must avoid degrading their performances into emoting, but great camp actors indulge the pleasure of tossing out nuance in favor of exaggeration.

In his adaptation of Christie’s murder mystery, Sandler faced the challenge of balancing between her interest in crime and his interest in camp, lest the crime be lost altogether. And so whereas Curtis and Novak can indulge in the campy excess of their supporting characters, Elizabeth Taylor cannot aim solely for humor in her performance as Marina Gregg because this character fears for her life—or at least she must pretend to do so. As explored above, Marina’s sparring with Lola allows her to exaggeratedly enact the bitchiness of the grande dame, yet she also displays the emotional fatigue of stardom, as evidenced in her resigned doggerel while looking in the mirror and regretting the inexorable march of time: “Bags, bags, go away / Come right back on Doris Day.” Sandler recalls his trepidation that Taylor might take umbrage at his humor at Marina’s expense and apologized to her—“I hope you aren’t too upset with some of the jokes I wrote.” Taylor’s reply—“They’ll love me for them!”—indicates that she understood the camp appeal of his words and her performance. It is intriguing to ponder, as well, whom Taylor might have intended with her pronoun “they.” Surely she is referring to her audience, but it seems at least plausible, given Taylor’s longstanding support of the gay community, that she realized the camp appeal of her performance and the ways in which her gay fans both identified with and adored her. Sandler states as well that Taylor “was the only actor who said every line exactly as written”—a testament to her commitment to her performance even when the jokes at Marina’s expense also reflect Taylor’s metamorphosis from her youth of stunning beauty to her middle-aged years of a more Rubenesque stature. Stars are separate from their roles, except not really, for a star must be appropriate for her roles, and thus the overlap between the star and her roles that builds her star persona. One can trace the erosion of Taylor’s beauty from her lead role in Cleopatra in 1963 to Marina Gregg in 1980, but this latter performance evidences as well her gracious and humorous resignation to time’s inevitable march. Further imbuing his film with camp tropes, Sandler here plays on the “aging diva phenomenon”—a character type most memorable in Gloria Swanson’s performance in Sunset Boulevard (1950)—but rather than rejecting the excess of such a role, Taylor embraced it.²²

Further in his characterization of Marina, Sandler portrays her as a woman so immersed in the world of filmmaking that the other characters (and thus viewers as well) must discern whether she is reacting honestly to the dire circumstances surrounding her or merely playing her part. In this light, the doubleness Page 114 →of “playing a part,” both for the screenwriter who writes the role and the actor who enacts it, offers another avenue for camp adaptation. This aspect of Marina’s character surfaces during her interview with Inspector Craddock when Taylor’s performance verges on hysteria and the hysterical: “Oh, God! It was me, wasn’t it? It was me they were trying to poison, wasn’t it? Who am I kidding? Somebody is trying to kill me, aren’t they? Somebody is trying to … poison me, aren’t they? Somebody is trying to kill me, aren’t they? Aren’t they? I know it! I can … ” As Marina is apparently building up to an emotional breakdown, Craddock interrupts her, continuing her performance—“‘I can feel it. I can almost hear them coming’”—as he then identifies the source of her words: “Danger in the Dark. MGM, 1932.” A character always ready for the cameras, Marina lives as if on stage, which highlights the ways in which performance permeates the film as a mode of existence. The actors of this film act, as of course they must, but the characters that they play indulge in hyperbolic acting as well, thus multiplying the film’s camp effect. To some degree, Sandler modeled Craddock on himself interacting with the stars on set, mentioning that he would “quote a line from one of [Taylor’s] movies and see if she could get them.”²³ Implicitly rebutting such critical bromides as “the death of the author,” Sandler demonstrates the ways in which the author can insert himself both through the screenplay he writes and through his comic mode of interacting with the performers.

With its humorous touches, even the film’s pointedly dry moments advance its overarching camp. At Marina Gregg’s reception, the camera appears to bypass various townspeople when moving to or following more central characters, yet the audience hears snippets of their conversation that are virtually shocking in their stultifying banality. One villager says, “I told you I lost my borage last year in the frost?” to which his interlocutor replies, “I’m sorry about that. You know what to do, don’t you? Cut it right down to the ground.” In another deadening exchange, a villager states, apropos of little, “Your dear wife had a cat.” His companion complains, “Yes, but it always suffered from eczema,” to which the first speaker proposes, “Carrots. Mashed carrots and a little warm milk work wonders.” With this eczema-afflicted cat, the film satirizes the deadening ennui of cocktail conversation, leaving viewers amused by the inanity of small talk and eager for the campy characters to seize control of the scene.

As camp offers screenwriters endless potential to queer an adaptation, such a vision must be endorsed by the director if it is to succeed, and any such contrast in artistic visions threatens to constrain the humor unleashed in the screenplay. The Mirror Crack’d delights with its bitchy camp, yet it is regrettable that Hamilton did not more fully accommodate Sandler’s comic vision. Sandler says of Hamilton: “He was not what you would call a sensitive, woman’s director; he was stern, British, and he didn’t have a lot of humor.” Explanding on such points, Sandler added, “I don’t think he’s a comedy director. He signed up for an Page 115 →Agatha Christie mystery, but I turned it into a campy backstage comedy.” Disappointingly, Hamilton rejected some of Sandler’s more daring comic touches. As much as Novak triumphs in her performance as Lola Brewster, Sandler advocated casting Debbie Reynolds to elevate the tension between the stars and their roles, owing to the obvious overlap between Christie’s plotline concerning Marina’s marriages and Taylor’s life when she married Eddie Fisher after he left Reynolds for her. For a bit of physical humor alluding to Taylor’s recent weight gain, Sandler wanted Marina to join Jason Rudd / Hudson in bed only for it to collapse; as he tersely summarizes of this idea: “didn’t happen.” In a scene cut from the film, Marina runs panicked from the set after drinking her purportedly poisoned tea; Novak’s Lola files her nails and deadpans: “Huh! You’d think she just spotted her diet doctor!” According to Sandler, Hamilton thought this joke dissipated the tension of the moment and he wanted to play the scene for its suspense rather than for its comedy. Mystery and comedy can be successfully merged—The Thin Man films provide examples—but it is also a challenge to unite disparate narrative modes, with one seeking to build suspense and the other seeking to release cathartic laughter. In this instance, Hamilton opted for mystery over camp, only to find that, in the final analysis, Sandler’s camp humor made the film immeasurably more memorable.

Although it is now heralded as a camp classic, several contemporary reviewers of The Mirror Crack’d apparently could not see the joke. The Newsweek reviewer derided it as a “starchy effort that is not only set in 1952 but appears to have been made then,” denouncing in particular “Guy Hamilton’s mothball-scented direction.”²⁴ The New York reviewer declared, “Every poky, pawky Christie crotchet—so delightful to the true fan—has been reverently preserved, but Hamilton can’t find a style for the fussiness that would make it witty. It’s a stupefyingly methodical movie.”²⁵ Maclean’s dismissed the film for its leisurely tempo: “Poorly lit, hastily edited and paced like a particularly boring game of Clue, the movie has the feel of a parish hall and the vitality of a vicar.”²⁶ With similar terms, Rex Reed, writing for Vogue, sniped: “If anything creaks, it’s not the doors of the inner sanctum, it’s the direction of Guy Hamilton. This is a slow, soft little film with an annoying lack of pace.”²⁷ From these opinions, it would appear that The Mirror Crack’d should have quickly faded into obscurity, a footnote to film history memorable only as a regrettable effort in the otherwise stellar cinematographies of Taylor, Lansbury, and Hudson.

Camp films, however, must be assessed through camp hermeneutics rather than through a standard critical lens, and a quick overview of camp classics demonstrates that such disparaging reviews are disappointingly predictable, as few mainstream reviewers appreciate or even recognize camp. Classics of the form, including Beat the Devil (dir. John Huston, 1953), Suddenly Last Summer (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (dir. Page 116 →Jim Sharman, 1975), and Showgirls (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1995), to name only a few, have been critically dismissed only for audiences more receptive to their pleasures to find them as the years pass. Several of the more positive reviews of The Mirror Crack’d praised Sandler’s campy script while assailing its stilted direction, thus foreshadowing such a shift in its critical reception. In this regard, the Time reviewer came closest to the mark, noting that “the good lines make Mirror more fun to watch than it has any right to be.”²⁸ The Maclean’s reviewer acknowledged that “the very idea of Liz Taylor and Kim Novak playing the Queen of Scots and Elizabeth R is a source of endless amusement, and the [screenwriter has] provided a spectacularly bitchy interplay for these two.”²⁹ Rex Reed leavens his criticism: “When Novak looks in the mirror, rips off her wig, and yells ‘Comb it out—you might find Amelia Earhart,’ … you don’t have to ask who steals the movie or why the mirror cracked.”³⁰ Even the grumpy Newsweek reviewer conceded that the film’s “bitchy fireworks are … the most arresting moments in this latest all-star Agatha Christie entry.”³¹

Certainly, the film’s enduring popularity, as evidenced by the enthusiastic reception it received at a January 2017 screening hosted by Outfest in West Hollywood and its recent rerelease on Blu-Ray DVD, testifies both that critics and audiences often seek divergent pleasures from the screen and that the film has withstood the test of time, particularly for queer audiences. In a recent assessment of Novak’s career singling out The Mirror Crack’d, Liz Smith states simply, “Every line is classic.”³² Campy pleasures blossom in the margins for resistant viewers who reject the standard trajectories and tropes of narrative and instead appreciate a humor that bends askew yet, for those in the know, never fails to hit its mark. For these reasons, The Mirror Crack’d has secured a beloved position in the queer film canon of camp, even though Christie herself paid relatively little attention to queer culture in her works. Few gay characters enter her pages, and as R. A. York proposes, “she shows simple distaste for male homosexuals” in her depictions of them.³³ (In The Mirror Crack’d, a minor character is disparaged as a “pansy” [164], in a mostly unremarkable yet telling example of Christie’s depiction of gay men.) Yet camp’s power as a comic mode allows it to circulate subversively where one might least expect it—in The Mirror Crack’d, a puzzling murder mystery featuring the keen-witted Miss Marple snaps to life in Sandler’s queer and campy adaptation. And despite the disjunction between Sandler’s and Christie’s styles, he also worked on the 1982 adaptation of her Evil Under the Sun—although the credits show only Anthony Shaffer as the screenwriter—and her And Then There Were None inspired the basic narrative structure of his Knock ‘Em Dead (2014). Agatha Christie’s novels may not spring to mind as a wellspring of camp comedy, but Sandler has proved the queer compatibility of her murders and his bitchy humor.

Page 117 →As The Mirror Crack’d exemplifies, adaptations should not be judged as much by their fidelity to their source texts but more by their unique perspectives on them. The stronger entries in the canon of Christie adaptations—Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express, Hamilton’s The Mirror Crack’d, Phelps’s many television miniseries—are united primarily by their reliance on a Christie source text but then diverge notably in their tones, styles, moods, and atmosphere. Looking to the future, Christie’s vast corpus promises to continually challenge authors and dramatists, screenwriters and directors, and a variety of other creative talents to reframe her fictional universe for new audiences, including video games designers, as several titles have been adopted in this format. In each instance, a Christie source text will serve to inspire, but it remains in the hands of the adapters whether her works will succeed in their latest retellings, in whichever medium they may be reframed. Christie need not have appreciated the vast majority of adaptations of her work, might not have even found a given adaptation a recognizable version of her story, but, in this great paradox of her legacy, she continues to benefit mightily from them, decades after her death.