![]() ![]() ![]() Jason Rafiel (Donald Pleasence) has her number: "She also has a mind like a bacon slicer." He is the one who nicknames her Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, in A Caribbean Mystery. Hickson's Marple is neither Rutherford's buffoon nor McEwan's camp schoolmarm: she is a frail elderly woman who is simply unshockable and fearless. Yet her mind has plumbed the depths of human iniquity, and taken it all in the day's work". There she sits, an elderly spinster, sweet, placid, so you'd think. Hickson captured perfectly the fluffy ruthlessness of Jane Marple: she has wispy white hair like the mohair she's so often knitting with her softly clicking pins the slight thickening of the voice when she's thinking the real sense that she is, as Sir Henry Clithering describes her, "one of the most formidable criminologists in England. And, by the way, when adapting a Christie novel, it would be sensible to remember that she was better at plotting than most of us will ever be, so maybe the addition of psycho lesbians doesn't improve the story (though obviously, it usually would). Suffice it to say Marple is a long way from Lucia, and that is a line which shouldn't have been crossed. ![]() And don't get me started on Geraldine McEwan, because I will only say something I regret. And in her late 70s, Hickson did, and defined Jane Marple so completely that she made the Margaret Rutherford version look like panto. ![]()
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