Talking Movies

As the title suggests, so forth.

Eternal Recurrence, or Magnum Music Musings, Again

ITV 4 has once again cycled back to the beginning of Magnum PI, and the wrong theme tune. Back in 2022 when ITV 4 started showing Magnum PI from the beginning, only to ditch the iconic theme tune after the two-part pilot, I got annoyed. I complained hereabouts at the time that it was replaced by some smooth jazz muzak that might have served, had I not known what should have been there. Indeed as the action set pieces in season 1 then sometimes included that rousing theme that we were apparently not allowed to hear over the opening credits, I mistakenly assumed this was a House scenario, where different audiences heard a different theme tune because of international licensing issues over the Massive Attack song ‘Teardrop’. And then suddenly, as I said in 2022, it was back; and it really sets the show up as the fun blast that it is, in a way that the smooth jazz muzak surely did not. I think the pilot’s title had been recut after the fact so that explains that, but some words on the music of Ian Freebairn-Smith, who I may have been unjust to. There is charm in his theme tune, but it feels like it would work well for a different show, in the 1970s. Something like The Protectors, for instance. I can imagine the aristocratic female lead appearing as his Magnum theme brings in a delicately tinkled piano and strings, after its curious jazz funk intro to brass arrangements. But it is easy to see why Mike Post when he started scoring episodes decided to make only notional use of Freebairn-Smith’s theme and began incorporating a more muscular guitar riff leading into brass and strings, with a far punchier rhythmic feel. Auditioning his theme within episodes until execs accepted the obvious truth – this is what the title theme ought to be, because it more accurately reflects the freewheeling optimism of Magnum.

Miss Marple

What a joy it has been watching BBC Four re-runs of Joan Hickson as the definitive iteration of Agatha Christie’s spinster sleuth Miss Marple in the 1980s BBC adaptations. The memorable title credits, with gossiping neighbours and evil eyes aplenty, showcase what the Marple mysteries are all about – seething resentments underneath a facade of rural civility. And Hickson, who first played the role at 78, expertly conveys that Jane Marple’s true superpower here is observing. People forget she is there, but she notices everything. Over her long life she has seen so many vindictive crimes and sins that nothing can shock her. And she can sometimes get flustered and forget to properly explain to less than sympathetic policemen exactly what she means when she picks out a name from her mental rolodex of horrors past that precisely explains the motivation or nature of a criminal or act in the present. There is a moment of bravura construction in the three parter mystery A Murder is Announced, where, after showing her observing a key character in the opening sequence, she then disappears for a good forty minutes, before the stumped detective is advised by his superior that there is someone he should try for a fresh set of eyes on the case, and so John Castle’s very competent Detective Inspector Craddock finds himself having a late tea at a seaside hotel with a true consulting detective: who within minutes of glancing thru his files has upended his entire conception of the case – by dint of her experience. She has lived, noticed, and remembered. There is a mind of steel camouflaged by the comfortable cardigans.

The Decline of Poirot

I was watching re-runs of Poirot on ITV 3 recently when they abruptly abandoned the one hour episodes, and jumped forward over a decade to two hour mysteries; made after Clive Exton had left to run Rosemary and Thyme. It is not hard to see why a man in his early 70s would choose to prioritise something of his own creation starring Felicity Kendal after a decade of stewarding grand characters from the interwar years. But it was a loss. In the sense of the (apocryphal?) man who cried, in the discomfited presence of Gladstone, “Oh God! What a loss Palmerston was!” Exton had avoided, for good reason, adapting the likes of Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and Appointment with Death. He’d only dared approach Evil Under the Sun by reverting to its original setting, an English occasional peninsula just off the coast instead of an isolated Mediterranean islet, which set clear blue water between it and the 1982 Peter Ustinov film version. And so other people stepped in for what I now think of, par post-1989 Doctor Who, as Zombie Poirot. Yes, David Suchet is present, because he craved the signal distinction of playing the sleuth in every mystery Agatha Christie wrote. His flat is different, but there are still some period trappings in design and costume. The obvious difference is the lighting. Like the soft-focus of Murder, She Wrote, combined with an over-lit haze on everything. The lights turned up to 11 and vaseline smeared on the lens. It is not an appealing aesthetic. But aside from the visuals I think the real difference between early Poirot and late Poirot is affection for Christie. You can feel Exton is enjoying himself playing with her characters and her stories. Whereas Zombie Poirot feels like the screenwriters are embarrassed by her work, and twist themselves in knots to bring their own peculiar sensibilities to bear. After the Funeral needs to be, in the regrettable argot of its time, “sexed up”: let’s throw in some incest, and belabour an invented red herring about a will disowning a lead character. Appointment with Death always needed more nihilism, don’t you think? As always, if you don’t actually like something, maybe don’t take a job writing it? (It all anticipates the James Bond writers who clearly don’t want to use Blofeld; acting like sulky children that they have to bloody use Blofeld because they got the bloody rights back.) And attributing to themselves a greater intelligence than the disdained Christie.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is one of those curious zombie ideas. It seems to have fallen on the sword of the replication crisis, and yet the notion of it as a truth persists. Perhaps because the world is replete with so many examples that seem to prove it. For instance the Dublin Theatre Festival trumpets an adaptation of Garcia Lorca that says of its mapping of Franco’s Spain onto DeValera’s Ireland – “Catholic Fascism = Catholic Fascism = duh”. This is wrong. Objectively wrong. Quite hysterically so, in fact. Because Franco didn’t hold elections. He certainly didn’t lose one, cede power, win a return to office, lose again, cede power again, and then win a return to office briefly, before ceding power to a trusted lieutenant to assume a ceremonial position. DeValera also foolishly forgot to murder tens of thousands of his political opponents to try and get even that bit closer to making the comparison work. Being wrong is one thing, but there’s the confidence – “duh”. To paraphrase Josh in The West Wing, “It’s the Duh that makes it Art”. That is why Dunning-Kruger lives on as an idea: People feel its “truthiness”. Because people are objectively wrong, hysterically wrong, yet supremely confident in the obviousness of their being right.