Social Historian: Christie in 1972
The Haunting of Venice is the third cinematic film in Kenneth Branagh's Hercule Poirot franchise, which confirms our abiding love for Agatha Christie. However, this latest venture has little in common with Halloween Party, the 1969 novel on which it is based.
The film is a «Grand Guignol meets Scooby-Doo,» a mass of camp horror—séances, ghost children, locked rooms, broken faucets—that turn out to be more human than supernatural in origin. Christie has used this trick in several of her works, but not in Halloween Party.
While purists may grind their teeth, Haunting in Venice, with its sharp script and voluptuous cinematography, is truly enjoyable. In truth, it's all about Christie: her star power, her mysterious gift, her images (a closed Venetian palazzo is transformed into a magnificent gothic «vicious circle») and her back catalog (the film references The Mystery of Sittaford, By the Pricks of My «). Thumb and more). He also acknowledges the moral core that runs through her work, her absolutism, with all the simplifications this may imply.
The Haunting of Venice is set in 1947, so the restoration of order and light—the ending in Christie—is about more than just solving a murder. It concerns a recently ended war, and in this respect the film has more in common than one might assume with the source material. «Halloween Party» was published in 1969.
His milieu — the wealthy enclave of Woodley Common — exists on a different planet from Altamont and Manson's crimes, but the inner worlds are not so far apart. Throughout the novel there remains a sense not only of evil — Christie always knew about this — but also of social unrest, family fragmentation, the old order under random careless attack.
David Suchet plays Hercule Poirot in Halloween Party, a film about social anxiety. Photo: ITV/Shutterstock
The novel begins with the murder of a child: the shocking thing is that no one is shocked. “You shouldn’t be surprised these days at what they do to a child,” says Poirot’s former police acquaintance. “People who break telephone booths or slash car tires do all sorts of things just to hurt people, just because they hate, not just anyone in particular, but the whole world. It’s kind of a symptom of our age.”
At almost 80 years old, the future lady Agatha may have tried to retreat from the gloomy modern realities. Instead, with the clear, calm gaze of a late Victorian, she faced them head on. The Halloween party is what one might call an indulgent society, with its overt references to sex, murderers and lesbianism (merely implied in the 1950 work A Murder Is Announced).
This is an allusion to the recent abolition of the death penalty: “It’s a shame they gave it up,” is one character’s point of view, which his creator may well have shared. This is a book, written in the present tense, that envisions—and embraces—a future in which structured societies of the traditional “Christian” type are threatened not only by unknown killers, but by rapidly approaching unstoppable change.
Agatha Christie's image, with its own power, is of a figure suspended in time, frozen in the aspic at an eternal tea party in a vicarage where someone has poisoned the crumpets. However, her 66 novels, spanning half of the 20th century, show that she was an accidental social historian, and the works of the 1960s provide an intriguing conclusion to her illustrious career. In many ways they are reflections on the nature of youth, who then begin their path to cultural dominance. From the perspective of old age, Christie saw the dangers of youth worship and the gullibility of those who joined it.
“You’re too old,” says the miniskirted protagonist to Poirot at the beginning of The Third Girl (1966), set in a pill-infested London populated by apartment dwellers, art school graduates and self-regarding Chelsea boys. As for Christie's final masterpiece, The Endless Night (1967), its young male narrator is the perfect embodiment of the instant gratification mentality: “We wanted the world, no less! We wanted to realize all our ambitions. We wanted to have everything, not to deny ourselves anything.”
How sonorous all this still sounds and how far from that “cozy” epithet that is so often attributed to Agatha Christie! There is also an intriguing irony to this. Christie's later work may bemoan the values of her own past—wisdom, experience, religious morality—but these are the qualities at the heart of the books that readers subconsciously crave.
Similarly, no matter how much modern adaptations subvert her, they still pay ironic homage to the fact that she represents confidence, confidence, belief in virtue, and that the public loves her for it. In fact, and perhaps unsurprisingly, we seem to need it more than ever.
Laura Thompson is the author of Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life; «Ghosts in Venice» is out now
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