Miss Marple: A Caribbean Mystery

Originally screened as a Christmas treat, this "Miss Marple" adaptation-- part of a cycle established since 1984- was mainly shot in Barbados and presumably commanded a bigger budget than usual. All the more surprising that direction was entrusted not to a BBC trusty but to Chris Petit, a critic who had turned road-movie maker, imitating Germans such as Wenders.

True, Petit had previously helmed PD James's "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman", with many an attempt to "subvert" that conservative Queen of Crime's material in a feminist direction; but the movie tanked, and this Agatha Christie version is more respectful. As others have remarked, the screenplay (by regular Christie scenarist Trevor Bowen, who as usual writes in a small part for himself) introduces a dash of political correction. Miss M trots round to Isabelle Lucas's shanty for a nice cup of tea to show she's no segregationist, and Shaughan Seymour's haughty white colonial administrator patronises the black police inspector: reasonably so, since the latter has less to do with solving the crime than Miss M's English foil DI Slack, as it turns out.

Donald Pleasence injects an amusingly repellent late cameo as a rough old fellow guest; Barbara Barnes (what happened to her?) is alluring as his put-upon secretary. But for the most part the story unrolls with no conspicuous directorial touches. This was Petit's height as a commercial proposition; subsequently he sank back into the wilderness of arty late-night TV projects. The explosion in British feature film production since the early 1980s seems to have left him as high and dry as Michael Winner, though one would not bracket them for any other reason.