User Reviews

The leads in movies based on Agatha Christie books should not wear leather jackets, like Colin Buchanan does for about 80% of the time in "The Pale Horse". It gives the movie a too-contemporary feel. It's officially set in the mid-1960s, but it seems to exist more in an unspecific time zone between the 1960s and the 1990s. The other problem with this story is that, for anyone even vaguely familiar with Christie's gimmicks, the entire "satanic witches" section of the plot is one giant transparent red herring, as the deaths that occur have of course a much more practical, factual explanation. The cast is adequate, Jayne Ashbourne as Kate is certainly very cute and likable. ** out of 4.

"The names...you'll take them to the police?" The dying woman gives the priest a list of names on a slip of paper. Not long after, Mark Easterbrook (Colin Buchanan) runs down a dark alley to assist a man being beaten. The assailant disappears. As the man dies he hands the list of names to Mark. Yes, the man is the priest. Hmmm.

The Pale Horse, or Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse, has a clever plot and occasionally good acting, It also has a muddied story line, a use of the three witches from Macbeth that teeters between silly and melodramatic, an unfulfilled hint of horror, an irrelevant red herring, too few suspects and a villain who is easily fingered.

When Mark gives the list to the police, they naturally think that Mark himself beat the priest to death. The inspector is no Morse or Dalgliesh. Think of Elmer Fudd with a working class accent and a dumb, sly nature. It's up to Mark to prove his innocence, uncover a dastardly murder business and expose a mastermind who overacts.

Mark, his girl friend Kate Mercer (Jayne Ashbourne) and Sergeant Corrigan (Andy Serkis), a young, friendly copper, eventually realize that all except one of the names are of people who have died far earlier than nature most likely intended. Eventually Mark discovers that the three eccentric old ladies who live in The Pale Horse, their ancient home that long ago had been an inn, believe themselves witches...and witches who have the power to bring death. This seems to give them great satisfaction. Then Mark learns of a bookmaker who has a sideline of accepting wagers on people's lives. With a proper introduction and evidence of financial reliability, he will, for instance, bet Mark that Mark's inconvenient former wife will be dead within two weeks. Mark will bet that she won't. In this case, Mark doesn't have an ex- wife, only Kate...and with her posing as the object of the bet, they'll expose a neat little murder-as-wager business. Ah, but what is the role of the three witches, for they must forecast the death. And if there is, indeed, murder, how can it be so well disguised as illness that no questions were raised about all those names on the list? Things become desperate for Mark when Kate soon takes to her bed, deathly ill and fading fast.

The plot, indeed, is clever. However, the combination of a script which sprawls, direction which allows this, and a basic misconception of how to play up Macbeth's witches with our horrid three, gives us 100 minutes with long stretches of dullness. Colin Buchanan, a good actor, makes an engaging Mark Easterbrook. For years he has been the Pascoe in the long- running Dalziel and Pascoe series. Andy Serkis is an unexpected gem as the sergeant...young, friendly, careful around his dunderhead superior, smart enough when it counts. Overshadowing them all are two practiced, pungent scene-stealers, Leslie Phillips and Michael Byrne. Phillips' talent to play plumy-voiced rogues is unmatched. Byrne is equally adept at arrogant, condescending bullies. Whenever they appear they provide the real pleasure in this story.

There have been many, many British television productions of Agatha Christie mysteries. Most have been very good. A few are a matter of taste (I've never warmed up to Tommy and Tuppence), and some simply have not worked well. The Pale Horse, I'm afraid, falls in this last category. It's not embarrassing or amateurish; it's just not very well done.

The Pale Horse is a good clever story if not among Agatha Christie's best. This 1997 adaptation of it is not a good adaptation of it at all and is disappointing on its own too. There are definitely far worse adaptations of Christie's books around(ie. Austin Trevor's Lord Edgware Dies, Alfred Molina's Murder on the Orient Express, 1989's Ten Little Indians, The Alphabet Murders and Geraldine McEwan's At Bertram's Hotel and Sittaford Mystery). But you can also do with far better as well(ie. the Russian version of And Then There Were None, Witness for the Prosecution, 1945's And Then There Were None, 1974's Murder on the Orient Express, Peter Ustinov's Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun and all of the Joan Hickson and David Suchet adaptations).

Any redeeming merits? Yes there are, even with anything I don't like there are actually not that many times where I have found no redeeming qualities in that regard. And that is the case with the Agatha Christie adaptations I didn't like either, though Trevor's Lord Edgware Dies and McEwan's At Bertram's Hotel came close. The Pale Horse does look good, the scenery, costumes and photography are very nicely done and give the adaptation a look that is both glossy and atmospheric. The acting is very good too, Colin Buchanan and Andy Serkis are very engaging, but I agree that Leslie Phillips and Michael Byrne give the best performances. The former roguish but interestingly with a plummy-rich voice that you don't hear a lot, and the latter terrifying in his arrogance and condescension. Jayne Ashborne is indeed lovely, but also for me compared to everybody else a little bland. The first 15 minutes were also entertaining and drew you right in.

Much doesn't work though. The music does not fit at all, it tries to be authentic to the setting that the story was originally set in, but it was such a shame that the setting that this adaptation adopted didn't follow suit. As a consequence, the effect was jarring and it even felt somewhat dreary. The dialogue is awkward and stilted often, is confused, jumps around a lot and very little is given developing the characters and story. The characters are just not interesting either, there are too few of them which really undermines the effectiveness of the final solution, as a result the ending(always a highlight with Agatha Christie) was flat. It was the story that fared the worst, to put it kindly it was a mess. It was convoluted to the point that it was either really implausible or/and very difficult to tell what was going on sometimes, it felt incomplete and like it was skipping over important plot points and characters. It was also very dull, Christie's books are deliberately paced but always engrossing but this adaptation's sprawling nature, drawn out scenes and little development in all honesty made the adaptation a chore to sit through. Something I didn't get from the promising first 15 minutes, and not since McEwan's Sittaford Mystery has an Agatha Christie adaptation made me feel as strongly as that. On top of that, the Macbeth-like witch scenes were clumsily shoe-horned in, and came across as melodramatic and just plain silly.

Overall, love Agatha Christie, didn't care for this outside of the production values and cast. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Spoilers herein.

Christie isn't appreciated much these days. She wasn't great at evoking the tone of a place, nor creating fully dimensional characters. She wasn't a master of the language. Today, we seem to prefer florid language, novel insertions into situations, (cats, priests, exotic locals and professions) and `psychological' weight.

But where she excelled was at understanding the elements of the mystery and devising plots that were not just clever but clever in ways that recognize the fact that it is a mystery story. Often the characters include a writer (or someone in showbusiness). And the twist would be an artifact of the telling of the story rather than the action within the story. She might have the narrator be the murderer, or have the murder victim be misidentified by the reader (and incidentally the people involved). Reading her work, at least in the middle years, is a lesson in understanding the form and bending the content to suit.

It is a postmodern idea not appreciated in our postmodern times. That is especially so when films are made of her stories. The BBC usually does a `faces and places' treatment, where characters and settings are supposed to amuse us until the end when we are surprised. The ending isn't the resolution of a puzzle, a tussle between writer and reader, but rather an expected but undeserved gift.

This particular production is less offensive than the BBC ones, especially the Poirot ones. It bears little resemblance to anything she wrote. But the spirit is dimly there: we have a confusing barrage of individuals and situations. The clues aren't presented fairly enough, but in a story this abbreviated they cannot be.

I think there is a lesson here. This script is close in tone to the overwhelming possibilities and suspended clearances of the books. But it is a dreadful film because we expect to know where we are and where we are going. I am convinced that mixing Christie books and film is quite a challenge. I have not seen it done well, and imagine it to be a fruitful filmschool exercise.

The business of the MacBeth witches was too clumsy to have come from anyone who actually knows the play.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.