Whodunnit! How your telly is brutally killing off the big screen
AGREAT weekend for all-star casts. We haven’t seen this many A-list names crammed onto the screen since the heyday of the Hollywood studios — proof TV has now replaced cinema as the world’s most important artform.
To underline the dominance of telly, the film of Agatha Christie’s Crooked House (C5) was premiered on a Freeview channel — before next year’s big-screen release.
This isn’t good news for everybody. If you prefer to pay a tenner each (or more) for two hours in a smelly auditorium, sitting on velveteen made greasy by 1,000 bums before yours, surrounded by the munch of popcorn and the dazzle of phone addicts checking social media, then you’ll have to wait for the cinema release.
Otherwise, C5 offered the chance to enjoy a big- budget murder mystery on your own screen, for free, and no need to shell out a fiver for a cup of coffee. How civilised.
In the era of the Beeb’s Saturday Night Cinema slot in the Seventies, TV stations lagged five years behind the local Odeon or Regal. Great fanfare was made when blockbusters such as The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure finally arrived on TV.
No longer. In the future, cinema will be good only for formulaic children’s fare that provides some excuse for a family outing — a Disney animation, Star Wars, that sort of thing.
Anything else worth watching will be commissioned by TV, whether that’s terrestrial channels, satellite and cable outfits, or the streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon. It’s curious this new era should be heralded by a movie so old-fashioned that the actors were probably paid in pounds, shillings and pence.
Crooked House gave us Glenn Close, Gillian Anderson and Christina Hendricks, hamming it up to 11 as they evoked the melodramas of the Forties. The chaps, including Max Irons and Terence Stamp, tried nobly but, like all Dame Agatha’s best tales, this one was chiefly concerned with the wickedness of women.
Writer Julian Fellowes’s tendency to shove pompous, verbose dialogue into his characters’ mouths suited this adaptation perfectly.
It was the story of a posh-boy private investigator, hired by an exgirlfriend to discover who had murdered an autocratic billionaire grandfather. Everyone tried to upstage the rest with such ruthless flamboyance, it’s a wonder there were any survivors.
But the coup de grace came in a car chase, with Miss Close chewing the steering wheel as the painted cardboard scenery flew by. What a Hitchcock villainess she would have made.
Cinema’s golden era was recreated and celebrated in Feud: Bette And Joan (BBC2), and how furious the ghost of Miss Joan Crawford will be that she still gets second billing to her nemesis, Miss Bette Davis, in the drama about the Hollywood divas’ infamous rivalry.
The monstrous heroines were played by two terrific stars, Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, who made their names on the big screen in the Eighties. Sensibly, they’ve come to TV, because it’s the only medium for analysing this vitriolic relationship in the depth it deserves.
These grandes dames, Davis and Crawford, came together to star in the 1962 horror movie Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Catherine Zeta-Jones and Kathy Bates played two more fading movie queens, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Blondell, telling the story to interviewers.
This added to the overflowing star quota, but it gave the production a fussy, wordy complexity that sometimes dragged. Never mind the background, just cut to the catfights.