Pauline Kael

“Vanessa Redgrave has a luminously loony quality in Agatha; she's playing a distraught Agatha Christie, and when the goddess-tall Vanessa is distraught there's all that wavering height--she seems more fragile than ordinary people, more exposed to the elements. Dressed in clinging twenties shifts [?], with jewel-like Art Nouveau embroidery at the neck, she looks so eerily sensitive that your mind may easily drift to the terrible (true) accounts of how people on the street sometimes laughed at Virginia Woolf-she looked so odd to them. Vanessa Redgrave endows Agatha Christie with the oddness of genius. But the people who made Agatha--Kathleen Tynan…; Michael Apted…; and a slew of producers and additional writers--haven't come up with enough for their sorrowful, swanlike lady to do.

“…. The movie attempts--very tentatively--to treat Agatha Christie as one of her own characters, and to invent a plot in the manner of one of her detecitive novels. But the situation is locked in: except for those "lost" days, her life is fully accounted for. So this fictional Agatha can't kill anybody or commit suicide; she can't even embark on a lasting love affair….

“This is the rare movie that is too fluid…. Some sequences suggest a series of orange-toned pre-Raphaelite paintings of the golden-red-haired Agatha floating by; she's always caught on the wing, trembling. She's a transcendently lovely swirling object--a living Burne-Jones and a poetic essay in neurasthenia--but where is her core of sanity? Where is the Agatha Christie who wrote the hundred and five books and plays--the woman who entertained herself and the world by devising complicated riddles? In the film, we see Agatha only when she isn't herself. The movie, too, lacks a core….

“…. There's also a performer in a small part who makes you wish she could take over the movie--Helen Morse, as Evelyn … Morse is such a vivid dimpled charmer that she makes you aware of how muted the film is….

“…. Yet the unattached bravura of Apted's directing has a gentle pull to it….”

Pauline Kael
New Yorker, February 26, 1979
When the Lights Go Down, 551-4
[Get little more?]