Director Guy Hamilton's seriocomic whodunit was late in a set of lush Agatha Christie mystery-novel adaptations from the UK producing team of John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin (of which 1974's Murder on the Orient Express is the best known). All were nostalgic, stereotypically British affairs with fine production values and spectacularly star-laden casts.
In a self-conscious throwback to a then-vanishing Golden Age Hollywood, this takes place in 1953, in the cozy English village of spinster sleuth Miss Marple (Angela Lansbury), where an American film crew has arrived to shoot a costume drama about Elizabethan royalty. The leading lady is aging screen goddess Marina (Elizabeth Taylor, in a role once intended for Natalie Wood), coveting a comeback under her director-husband (Rock Hudson) after a tragic hiatus from the public eye.
To Marina's displeasure, she's suddenly cast against a venomous rival, sexpot starlet Lola (Kim Novak), who happens to be the spouse of the fast-talking producer (Tony Curtis). At a village meet-and-greet with the divas, a local busybody drops dead from a poisoned cocktail—evidently, a fatal drink intended for Marina. Who is responsible?
Fans accustomed to seeing Lansbury in TV's Murder She Wrote will be comfortable with her sleuthing here, which almost comes across as a dry run for the series, although due to Marple's minor ankle injury most of the legwork here falls to her Scotland Yard nephew (Edward Fox), a closet film fan.
The Christie plot (from the novel The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side), slightly rewritten, in the end, is not top-drawer, being less a whodunit than a why-done-it and not the finest screen outing for the iconic author. Still, the selling point is more the Tinseltown magic, with Taylor (surprisingly poignant) and Novak (exhibiting her sleek figure in a series of skin-tight and revealing ensembles) having a great time with their outsized, catty showbiz personas; both would largely withdraw from big-screen acting after this.
The highlight of the disc extras (which include trailers and contemporary promo spots) is a three-way conversation/commentary between cineastes Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson, ranging on topics from the Christie screen legacy to Taylor's inspired casting to (perhaps a bit of overthinking it here) the recurring themes of identity dislocation and artifice/imposture in the films of Guy Hamilton, right down to his 007 hit Diamonds are Forever. A strong optional purchase.