Too bad this was the best headgear. I’d have preferred the title Evil Under Hats. Or maybe Evil Under Hairpieces.
Evil Under the Sun (1982) is a lightweight rendition of Agatha Christie’s Poirot stumbling into a murder, this time on a French vacation beachfront. Make no mistake, there are twists and gambits, passions and hatreds, but somehow it never comes to life. A is dead, B through F have reasons, even good reasons, to kill A, but in the end the bad guys would get away, if they just hadn’t made that one tiny error.
Meh.
Perhaps the problem is the scenery dominates the movie, fabulous cliffs and blue seas and men and ladies in scant, for the time, swimming clothing. But it all feels so bourgeois, as if it’s happening again and again on all the beaches local to this one, to the self-centered by the self-centered. Bourgeois? Yes, bourgeois, crimes of the bourgeois against the bourgeois.
It may be murder, but in some essential sense it feels like a peculiarly bourgeois crime, committed by newcomers to the class of bourgeois against its royalty, a ridiculous statement on its face, and, yet, a truth that renders the drama painfully socially provincial: no one really cares, but, perhaps, Poirot and his neurotic physique.
Perhaps the lack of Poirot-foil is brought to a sharp point in this drama, as Captain Hastings, the naive and jealous sidekick of Christie’s invention, is not yet present. In other of the Belgian’s dramas he’s the anchorline for Poirot, who is the racing yacht, holding the quicksilver detective in close contact with the working men and women who have suffered at the hands of some criminals’ mischief; or, sometimes, the reverse, as the lower-class criminal buffets the hapless heiress, relieving her of her ill-earned millions and even her life, much to her grief.
But in Evil Under The Sun, it’s not so much the criminals, but the entire social system under indictment, an indictment equal parts criminal and petty and boring. They all dance, but it’s all uncertain mincing and tights exhibiting dismaying seams.
Et ainsi ça se passe.
