Listen up, Kenny, we’ve been more than fair so far. We’ve taken your spin on Agatha Christie’s most famous detective with good humor. The … interesting mustache choice, the most cursed castings ever seen by a publicist — you are clearly having fun, and who are we, the viewing public, to get in the way of that? But don’t you dare lay a hand on Jane Marple. Speaking to AMC Theatres, Branagh said he would love to see Christie’s No. 2 gal up on the big screen, maybe even alongside his bifurcated-mustache-wearing Hercule Poirot. “I’d love to see Marple in a movie universe. I really would,†Branagh said. “Wouldn’t it be great to put them together? I think that’d be fun.†But, of course, Marple has already gotten the feature-film treatment.
Her big-screen debut came in 1980’s The Mirror Crack’d, based on the Christie novel The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side and not, alas, Cracked magazine. The film stars Angela Lansbury as Marple before she basically reprised the role for 12 seasons on Murder, She Wrote. The Mirror Crack’d is a big to-do of classic-Hollywood stars: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, and Kim Novak are all suspects. Now that’s star power, Kenneth.
I can hear you now, Mr. Branagh, arguing that 42 years is enough time between adaptations. Death on the Nile was made with Peter Ustinov in the ’stache, after all. But hark! A more recent adaptation of Marple stories for TV is splashy and (British-TV) star-studded and adds lots of queer backstories for contemporary relevance reasons: Agatha Christie’s Marple on ITV has Natalie Dormer menacing people with a poisonous snake, so don’t even try to top it. Why not take a crack at Tommy and Tuppence? They could use the PR boost.