Four women and a murder (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Four women and one murder |
| Original title | Murder Most Foul |
| Country of production | Great Britain |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1964 |
| length | 87 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | George Pollock |
| script |
David Pursall Jack Seddon |
| production | Ben Arbeid |
| music | Ron Goodwin |
| camera | Desmond Dickinson |
| cut | Ernest Walter |
| occupation | |
| |
Four women and a murder (original title: Murder Most Foul ) is a crime film from 1964. The loose template for the film is the crime novel Four women and a murder (Mrs. McGinty's Dead ) by the English author Agatha Christie , published in 1952 .
action
Margaret McGinty, a barmaid and former actress, is found hanged in her apartment. Since an arriving police officer has apparently caught the alleged perpetrator, James Bentley, in the act, the conviction of the accused appears to be only a formality. Miss Marple is one of the twelve jurors in the case and is the only one convinced of the man's innocence. Since a judgment can only be passed unanimously and the old lady does not want to be dissuaded from her dissenting opinion, there is no announcement of the verdict and the case is postponed to a renegotiation. Miss Marple felt the displeasure of the police, the jury and the judge, but remained steadfast. She decides to use the time to investigate herself. She is supported by the librarian Stringer.
Miss Marple gains entry to the house of the murdered woman by pretending her sister to collect for the church bazaar. The sister is distracted by Stringer and Miss Marple can search the belongings of the murdered. She comes across programs from a small Driffold Cosgood theater group that travels through the province, as well as a daily newspaper with cut-out words and parts of words. Using a full copy of the same newspaper issue, she came to the conclusion that the cut-out words formed a ransom note that McGinty was a blackmailer and that the blackmailer probably murdered her.
Miss Marple applies to act for Cosgood and performs a ballad by Robert W. Service . Cosgood thinks the account is ridiculous, but changes his mind when Miss Marple suggests she is wealthy. Cosgood senses the opportunity to win a patroness for the clammy group and gives her the opportunity to learn acting as a kind of intern. She joins the group and quickly realizes that there is significant conflict between the members. Soon after, one of the actors, George Rowton, is murdered. In the cloakroom you will find the ransom note, which was created from the daily newspaper found at McGinty. Inspector Craddock consequently considers it possible and later even probable that Rowton was the blackmailed, killed his blackmailer McGinty and poisoned himself a little later out of shame. For Miss Marple, however, this is the wrong track - she suspects that the ransom note was only deposited in Rowton's room to raise suspicion.
As a new member of the drama troupe, she is supposed to play an amateur detective in a play written by Cosgood. During the rehearsal she speaks of the murdered Mrs. McGinty and portrays this as a slip of the tongue. With this she signals to the murderer that she is on his trail. Shortly thereafter, she escapes an attempted murder by cyanide , which instead meets her fellow actress Dorothy. Miss Marple then continues to research. The ransom note referred to a play that was performed 13 years ago and to a "rose". Miss Marple finds out that McGinty performed with an actress named Rose Kane 13 years ago. She later murdered her husband and was sentenced to death and hanged for it. One child stayed behind: Evelyn Kane, whose tracks are lost.
Shortly before the performance, Miss Marple asks the entire theater group into her cloakroom and toasts with champagne. For everyone to see, she put up a picture of Rose Kane so that the murderer must know that he is about to be exposed. The unstable actress Eva McGonigall kidnaps Miss Marple into the area under the stage and threatens her with a knife, but abandons this plan because she is frightened. Then the real killer appears: Bill Hanson, who is engaged to actress Sheila Upward. He is the son named Evelyn Kane. When he performed in Milchester, McGinty recognized him and began blackmailing him. Since his fiancée Upward belongs to the nobility, he feared that her father would never consent to the marriage if he found out that Kane was the son of a murderess. He had then brought hush money to McGinty and murdered her in the process. He had embezzled the money from George Rowton, so he had to murder him too when he began to find out about him. After this explanation, Hanson takes up the dagger to kill Miss Marple. However, this pulls a loaded revolver and prevents him from escaping with a precise shot.
Inspector Craddock, who rushed to the rescue after her first warning shot, is also injured and ends up, like Cosgood, in the hospital. There the inspector tells Miss Marple that after the case was successfully resolved, he was promoted to chief inspector. Cosgood's attempt to win her as a patron for his next play, however, refuses.
Trivia
- Four women and a murder is the third of a total of four Miss Marple films with Margaret Rutherford in the leading role. All films were produced by MGM's British subsidiary .
- At the end of the film, Miss Marple declines Cosgood's offer to finance his play for a new performance, saying: "I'm not a cash cow". In the English original, she is more charming in that she refers to the common English term "angel" for patrons : "Mr Cosgood, whatever else I am, I am definitely no angel."
- As with the second Miss Marple film adaptation ( The Wax Bouquet ), the template is an adapted Hercule Poirot case. In the USA the novel was published under the title Blood will Tell .
- In 2008, the book was remade more faithfully to the original with David Suchet in the lead role as Poirot in Mrs. McGinty is dead .
- Margaret Rutherford and Stringer Davis re-appeared in their roles in a short sequence in the Poirot film " The Alphabet Murders " ( The Alphabet Murders , 1965) with Tony Randall in the lead role.
- Agatha Christie is said to have been very dissatisfied with the film title Murder Most Foul and to have described it as rotten ("lousy"). The title, however, is a quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet (Iv27-28), “ Murder most foul, as in the best it is, / But this most foul, strange and unnatural. "(Yes, vile murder, as it is in the best, but this outrageous and unnatural. | Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5), and therefore matches the context of theater related topics in the film.
- For the BBC remakes in the 1980s, Agatha Christie's daughter Rosalind Hicks hired actress Joan Hickson , who played the detective in all twelve Miss Marple films in the series.
- Stringer Davis was married to Margaret Rutherford .
synchronization
The German synchronized editing was created in 1965 in the MGM Synchronization Atelier, Berlin . The title chosen for the film in German is misleading: As with the film The Wax Flower Bouquet , the German title of the novel was chosen, but the four women in the book do not exist in the film; and there was not just one murder, but three as usual.
Dialogue and direction: Michael Günther
| role | actor | Voice actor |
|---|---|---|
| Miss Marple | Margaret Rutherford | Ursula War |
| H. Driffold Cosgood | Ron Moody | Erich Fiedler |
| Inspector Craddock | Charles Tingwell | Gert-Günther Hoffmann |
| Judge Crosby | Andrew Cruickshank | Paul Wagner |
| Ralph Summers | Ralph Michael | Siegfried Schürenberg |
| Bill Hanson | James Bolam | Joachim Pukass |
| Jim Stringer | Stringer Davis | Walter Bluhm |
| Constable Wells | Terry Scott | Gerd Duwner |
| Sergeant Brick | Windsor Davis | Peter Schiff |
| Gladys Thomas | Megs Jenkins | Edith Schollwer |
Reviews
"Relaxed crime entertainment based on Agatha Christie, which amusingly walks between horror stories, comedy and crime thriller."
“The black humor drives macabre flowers. Good craftsmanship, perfect synchronization and the Rutherford made a comfortable thriller. "
"[...] with tension and wit, in the usual weird Rutherford manner, the film story advances, the heroine skillfully combines."
"(...) but the fun would only have been half as great without the lovable, splendid leading actress."
“Director Pollock works with all the means and meshes of a routine mood-making. An exciting, enjoyable crime thriller with a lot of brains and a dash of arsenic. "
"George Pollock also staged this 90-minute piece without any recognizable cinematic ambitions, but with a lot of leeway for Rutherford's meshes and mannerisms."
"Ron Moody is first class."
media
literature
- Agatha Christie : Four Women and One Murder. Novel (Original Title: Mrs. McGinty's Dead ). German by G. Martin. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16990-9
- Georg Seeßlen : George Pollock and the British Miss Marple films in this: Murder in the cinema. History and mythology of the detective film . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1981, ISBN 3-499-17396-4
- Klaus Rödder: They have their methods - we have ours, Mr. Stringer: Dame Margaret Rutherford - In the footsteps of Miss Marple . Bösche Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-923809-87-5
music
The soundtrack for the Miss Marple films is by Ron Goodwin . The theme song has appeared on various LPs and CDs. A suite from the films is available on the CD The Miss Marple Films , Label X LXE 706.
DVD
- Miss Marple - 4 DVD box with all four films with Margaret Rutherford (multiple editions). In a first four-box from Warner Home Video from 2003, however, all of the films are not in the original widescreen version on the DVDs. Only killer ahoy! is contained approximately in the original format of 1.66: 1. In a new edition of the four-box from Warner in 2006, the films have been digitally revised and this time - in contrast to the information on the packaging - in the format of 1.78: 1. The difference between the two editions is that the image of the first edition (and the previous TV broadcasts) is cropped at the side, but contains more information at the top and bottom of the image (which seems to indicate an open matte version), while the image of the New edition is trimmed at the top and bottom of the picture, but offers more picture information on the sides. Both versions therefore differ from the original format.
Web links
- Four women and a murder in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Four women and one murder. In: synchronkartei.de. German synchronous index , accessed on September 10, 2007 .