It is not difficult to find an opportunity to watch most of the major screen productions of Agatha Christie stories. Even today, decades since the last major English-language film adaptation, many of the movies based on her work are frequently shown around the world on television, while most are readily available to purchase for home viewing. On certain television channels, screen adaptations of Christie’s work are a near permanent fixture, shown on what may appear to be a constant loop, losing all sense of original context as high-definition remasters allow for little distinction between any of the major film and television productions from the last half-century. Rather than being seen as a myriad of screen adaptations from various countries, directors, performers and production companies, many Agatha Christie films and television series seem easily separable from any sense of time or place that might have been a crucial stabilising block of the original production. However, the films that turn up with such regularity do not tell the whole story, and may give the impression that the works of Agatha Christie moved to the screen with greater ease than was actually the case. For an indication of the difficulties faced in translating such a popular novelist from the page to the screen, we need look no further than the period covered by this first section, which deals with a lesser-known area of Agatha Christie on cinema screens: namely, the films made prior to the outbreak of war in 1939. Almost all of the movies explored in this section have not been commercially released or shown on television, while several are no longer known to exist, victims of archiving policies designed for short-term distribution rather than long-term preservation. This loss means that the emphasis will sometimes tend towards reconstruction as we build an understanding of how the films operated as adaptations. This forms the basis of our exploration of how Agatha Christie’s works have been brought to the screen, often in ways that were highly interesting, if not necessarily faithful.
We start in 1928, the year in which Agatha Christie published her eighth novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train, a book that she found difficult to complete and that she would later claim was the first time she wrote out of obligation rather than for pleasure—an indication that she now saw her writing as a permanent career rather than a fleeting success. This change of perspective coincided with some of the first appearances of Christie’s stories outside of the printed word, most notably the stage production Alibi, based on her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. However, the year also saw the release of the first film to be based on one of her stories—a production that has posed several mysteries of its own.
The Passing of Mr Quinn (1928)
While the most significant films of 1928 included Al Jolson’s second ‘talkie’, The Singing Fool (d. Lloyd Bacon), and the landmark French picture La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (d. Carl Theodor Dreyer), the British silent movie The Passing of Mr Quinn (d. Leslie S. Hiscott) was produced on a somewhat smaller scale, on a low budget with modest aims for commercial success. The production was ostensibly an adaptation of Christie’s short story of the same name that was later renamed ‘The Coming of Mr Quin’, 1 but the film differs so much from the original mystery that it sits alongside a small selection of screen adaptations that can only be described as ‘originally influenced by Agatha Christie’, since it is substantially unlike the original tale. 2 In Christie’s story, a dinner-party discussion of a suicide that had taken place some years earlier is interrupted by the appearance of the mysterious and charming Mr Quin, whose gentle questioning of the participants results in the revelation that Derek Capel, the man who had taken his own life, had a dark secret from which he was trying to escape. This was Quin’s first appearance and he would go on to be a semi-regular figure in Christie’s work, but little of the original story was to make it onto screen—an early sign that Christie’s works were not always adapted because producers were particularly keen on reproducing the narrative.
Unfortunately, this is one of a handful of Agatha Christie movies for which there is no known copy in existence, meaning that any discussion of it requires the piecing together of information in an archaeological manner. The lack of a known print of the film is undoubtedly the reason it has been relatively little discussed, but this does not mean that the production is either unimportant or uninteresting. In fact, combining the known information about the film presents an exciting puzzle of its own, as it soon becomes clear that this missing film was to play a significant role in the future of Agatha Christie screen adaptations. We are fortunate to have an unusually detailed outline of its plot thanks to a tie-in novelisation that would eventually become the source of some controversy. 3 Credited to G. Roy McRae (likely a pseudonym 4 ), The Passing of Mr. Quinn was published as a small hardback edition in a series called The Novel Library, alongside such titles as a reprint of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga and some of the works of H.G. Wells. The novelisation is prefaced with an attempt to create some distance between this story and Christie’s own work. Not only do the film and book add an ‘n’ to the Quinn of the title, but the novelisation’s text actually changes the character name further, to Mr Quinny, opening with the curious disclaimer: ‘Readers are requested to note that Mr. Quinny of this book is the same person as the Mr. Quinn of the film.’ 5 We can have some confidence that this narrative conforms reasonably closely to what was seen on screen, as it correlates with the small number of photographs in existence as well as the contemporary synopses offered in the trade press.
In the film The Passing of Mr Quinn, the chemist Professor Appleby (played by experienced film actor Clifford Heatherley) is shown to be abusive to his wife Eleanor (Trilby Clark, an Australian actress who at 25 years old was 15 years younger than the actor playing her husband). Resultantly, Eleanor has sought comfort in a man named Derek Capel (Vivian Baron, in one of only three known film appearances by the actor), who has become her lover. Appleby is then murdered (by an apparently ‘untraceable’ poison 6 ) and Capel disappears. Eleanor is placed on trial, which takes up much of the proceedings, only to be acquitted. So far, the plot has broad similarities to some of the events that are mapped out in Christie’s short story; however, what follows is a convoluted and largely unrewarding plot that also fundamentally alters the character of Quinn. Eleanor leaves for Europe in order to become a nun, despite a new love for a doctor called Alec Portal (Stewart Rome, a prolific English film actor with over 150 credits to his name), who tracks her down after two years. Alec manages to convince her to return home, only then to discover a letter that he believes demonstrates that Eleanor killed her husband after all. At this point, the mysterious Mr Quinn also arrives in town. In the film’s novelisation, Quinn (or Quinny) is described as a less than attractive character:
[A] man with bent back, lips that twitched, and eyes that, behind the pince-nez he wore, had a fixed and curious look. His face was yellow, and as he raised his hat he revealed untidily matted hair, heavily streaked with white. […] Yet his voice was pleasant and musical; it was the only part of him that seemed to have survived the blast of the storm that had struck him and prematurely aged him. 7
Later, Quinn is shown to be an alcoholic who possesses ‘satanic, jeery laughter’ and is clearly nearing the end of his life. 8 Given the fact that Mr Quinn appears to possess every theatrically possible anomaly, it is probably unsurprising that this thoroughly unlikeable character is eventually revealed to be a disguise, donned by Derek Capel. Capel confesses to the murder of Professor Appleby and encourages Eleanor and Alec to live their lives together, shortly before he dies. 9 This revelation is nonsensical whether seen through the prism of the film as an adaptation of Christie’s story, where this Quinn character bears no resemblance to her ethereal Quin, or as a film plot in its own right, where it serves no real purpose and comes too late in the proceedings to be any real puzzle or revelation. In Christie’s story, the charismatic Quin simply encourages those present to work out the solution for themselves, and has no relationship with Derek Capel. The review in Variety was particularly dismissive of the film’s depiction of its title character, pointing out that ‘Everybody save the folk on screen recognized Quinn at once as Capel, so where there was any mystery and what it was still needs figuring out’; an existing photograph of Quinn supports this conclusion. 10
One reason for the film not closely adhering to the short story’s narrative is that the picture did not move into production to capitalise on the ongoing success of Agatha Christie’s works, nor due to any particular desire to bring this story to the screen. In l...