Cheap Agatha Christie's Miss Marple - The Classic Mysteries Collection (DVD) (Martyn Friend, John Davies, Christopher Petit) Price

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Customer Reviews of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple - The Classic Mysteries Collection

Impeccable Acting and Terrific Agatha Christie Adaptations
I have this set and enjoy it immensely, mainly for my all-time favorites, "Nemesis" and "Bertram's Hotel." <
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>Joan Hickson nails Miss Marple as does everyone associated with this series production. I read all the books before watching the series so I knew what Miss Marple was supposed to be. This Marple series maintains the integrity of Agatha Christie's writing and that's pretty difficult to do when transferring a book to film. <
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>The sets are sumptuous and we get great views of the English countryside. Miss Marple is appropriately a spinster with a mind like a steel trap. She's underestimated by the murderer mainly because no one can believe that a senior citizen can be so smart. But Jane Marple is just that and she uses the ruse to get information that no police detective could. <
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>I won't go into details about each movie since someone else has done that here. I will suggest that if you want to really see AGATHA CHRISTIE'S MISS MARPLE, you will buy this set. The newer Miss Marple with Geraldine McEwan is a major disappointment and totally unrecognizable to Christie's superb writing. <
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Bad Batch?
I ordered this DVD set and we were looking forward to many hours of enjoyable viewing. Some of the DVD's in the set, however, had digital scrambling problems, so we did the Amazon return thing, requesting that a replacement set be sent. When we received that replacement set, we were very disappointed to see that the digital scrambling was exactly the same as in the first set. I don't know if we got two from the same bad batch, or what, but now we don't have the set we were looking forward to placing in our video library.

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The only dramatization that faithfully presents AGATHA CHRISTIE'S Miss Marple
In "An Autobiography," Agatha Christie wrote, "Miss Marple insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival. I wrote a series of six short stories for a magazine, and chose six people whom I thought might meet once a week in a small village and describe some unsolved crime. I started with Miss Jane Marple, the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother's Ealing cronies--old ladies whom I met in so many villages where I had gone to stay as a girl. Miss Marple was not in any way a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with her--though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right...." <
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>Later, Christie added, "Miss Marple was born a the age of sixty-five to seventy--which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate, because she was gong to have to last a long time in my life. If I had had any second sight, I would have provided myself with a precocious schoolboy as my first detective; then he would have grown old with me." <
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>There you have the most authoritative pronouncement on the nature and character of Miss Jane Marple--and here, in this series, we have that fussy and spinsterish old lady's most authoritative portrayal. <
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>Major actresses have offered famous performances of a mystery-solving elderly lady named Marple--Margaret Rutherford, Helen Hayes, Angela Lansbury and, as I write this, Geraldine McEwan. Some have been quite good in their versions of Miss Marple. Margaret Rutherford, in fact, was simply wonderful. <
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>However, not one portrayed Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. None of these fine actresses was able to resist the urge to twinkle--to give just a hint of knowing glee, to be lovable. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple does not, and never did, twinkle. Though a cheerful person, you see, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right; there wasn't a twinkle in her. <
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>Joan Hickson never twinkles, not once. She is Christie's fussy, spinsterish old lady down to her bones. She is sometimes Nemesis and someetimes, as Detective Inspector, later Superintendent Slack so acutely points out, a grey-haired cobra. Joan Hickson inhabits the character of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple so completely that I find it shocking when I see her in another role, for she usually portrayed brassy, hard-edged women who couldn't possibly have been more unlike the old maid of St. Mary Mead. <
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>Joan Hickson is the pearl in this oyster, but these BBC productions from the 1980s have other merits. Wholly unlike the current series that is so carelessly stomping on memories of Christie and Marple, alike, the writers in the 1980s actually seem to held Dame Aggie in respect. Practical considerations did not allow them to transfer Christie's every word and situation to the screen, but they did manage to transfer her spirit and tone with remarkable fidelity. These dramatizations of Christie's novels almost always feel right, even when they depart from the originals. <
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>Just as there is a tone in the writing, there is a tone in the acting. At some time in pre-production, it must have been decided that all parts would be played straight. No character was to be a "type" or caricature--not the half-ga-ga clergyman at Bertram's Hotel nor the superannuated Bright Young Thing also in residence there, not the huntin' and shootin' local squire who awakes to be informed that there is a dead body in his library, not even the kindly village rector with the corpse littering his vicarage. The decision made, it was obviously rigidly enforced, for none of the fine British actors, some of them notorious hams, ever steps out of character. The gap between this approach and that taken by the current, McEwan series could not be wider. <
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>Finally, there is the matter of the setting. Both the Hickson series and the McEwan series are notionally set within a year or two of 1955. The current series forcefully thrusts the era into the laps of its viewers. In the recent version of "4:50 from Paddington," for example, there is a wholly gratuitous scene in which Noel Coward (no less) is performing at the piano for a small party in his digs at which Lord Mountbatton ("Dickie") is present. The Hickson series is infinitely more subtle; there is an underlying and pervasive air of the era's austere scrimping and saving as part of the daily routine. It is hardly noticeable--and all the more effective for that reason. <
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>Other reviewers have brought up matters of interest with regard to edits and formats, so there should be a buyer beware warniong, at least for some purchasers. My own reaction to this version of the Hickson series is that it perfectly acceptable to my personal requirements. Others might feel differently. <
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>My rating relates to the writing, production and acting found in this series: five stars without doubt or hesitation.