Yesterday evening, we started out watching a television movie from 2013 called 'The Lady Vanishes', a version of which we have seen before, possibly not this one.
But after about 15 minutes we decided that the whole thing was far too noisy and busy for us, and dropped back to Agatha's 'Yew Tree Lodge', according to the late Joan Hickson. Far more suitable for the older viewer, neither noisy nor busy. An episode which we might well have watched half a dozen times over perhaps twice as many years.
BH was awake enough to spot the coincidence that the mystery lady in the the first was the same as the efficient housekeeper in the second, one Selina Cadell, who seems to have specialised in slightly odd English ladies. I kept my end up by remembering that one of them was in the very first episode of Midsomer Murders, which we might also have watched half a dozen times over perhaps twice as many years. Selina Cadell playing Phyllis Cadell. Which makes me wonder what tricks did she had to pull on the casting couch to be allowed to use her own surname, at least the one she was born with, or the one that she works with.
Perhaps we would have got on better with the original Hitchcock version of the lady, snapped above, although I am no great fan of Hitchcock. Not that I actively dislike his work, rather that, for one reason or another, I have never gotten around to consuming much of it.
PS: like that other prolific crime writer Simenon, Christie gets added value out of her plots by recycling them. With a lot of elements of the present (post war) story also being present in earlier (pre war) Poirot story, 'Poirot's Christmas'. But at least it was a genuine Marple yarn, not one into which she had been inserted by the television people - which does not always work very well.
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