john_amend_all

"It's very dangerous to believe people. I haven't for years."
— Miss Marple

Newlyweds Giles and Gwenda Reed, house-hunting in Devon, come across Gwenda's dream house: Hillside. At Gwenda's insistence, they buy it and move in. But Gwenda finds the house disconcertingly familiar: she knows the location of a blocked-up door, and the pattern of the wallpaper in a sealed cupboard. And then she gets a full-blown flashback of a woman being strangled...

Gwenda begins to doubt her sanity.

I think that the first half-hour of the first episode of this story contained more nightmare fuel for the younger me than the rest of the series put together. Gwenda gets scared out of her wits by perfectly ordinary things, and that's what's so terrifying. A lot of this is done through the music. In the previous five serials, it was more or less confined to character leitmotifs. Here, it's the major factor in illustrating Gwenda's growing sense of terror as her buried memories break through.

Once Gwenda has met Miss Marple, the supernatural-horror aspect is mostly shelved, to be replaced by more mundane but equally distressing revelations about her father and stepmother. During the second episode, she more or less manages to keep on top of these, but the final revelation reduces her to sobbing in Miss Marple's arms.

"All I am saying, my dear, is that I wish — Oh, I do so wish — that you'd leave the past alone."

Geraldine Alexander does a splendid turn as Gwenda. IMDB tells me that she was in Vengeance on Varos, for those interested. I got a bad case of "Hey, It's That Guy!" with Frederick Treves as Doctor Kennedy. Again, going by IMDB this shouldn't be any surprise; he's been in everything. I think I recognised him from Inspector Morse, but apparently he was also in Meglos.

You'll have had your tea?

There's also Terrence Hardiman, whom I'm most familiar with as Abbot Radulfus from Cadfael; he also played Hawthorne in The Beast Below. He's obviously the go-to guy for when you want someone with sinister-looking pale eyes (which are, in this case, completely true to the book).

'What a very quiet face Walter Fane had.'

We revert to the episodic format here, so there's a cliffhanger: Gwenda, riding on a train and reading her father's diary, muses on what she has learned. I remember this cliffhanger for the wrong reason — the previous time I watched this, it was an omnibus with the two episodes glued together, and whoever had done it left a second or so of the cliffhanger 'sting' in there.

I think this is the Greenway Viaduct on the Paignton to Dartmouth Railway, not far from Agatha Christie's Devon house.

Again, this serial ends in the traditional manner, with self-turning door handles and a shadowy murderer creeping about. It's inverted a little, though, because it's shot from the intended victim's point of view rather than the detectives'. So we quickly learn who the person in the sinister grey gloves is, but not that the cavalry are waiting in the wings to charge in to the rescue. Again, it was a behind-the-sofa moment for me on first viewing.

One blooper I remember seeing mentioned on IMDB: When Miss Marple is spraying the flowers for greenfly (with Chekhov's Syringe), the gardener's coffee mug is right in the firing line.