Agatha Christie Screen Spotlight: Soapy 1980s TV Movie ‘Sparkling Cyanide’
Before she created the iconic character of private investigator Kinsey Millhone in her so-called “alphabet” novels (beginning with “A” Is for Alibi), author Sue Grafton spent 15 years working as a screenwriter for film and television. Although she has writing credits on everything from an episode of classic sitcom Rhoda to a remake of 1944 fantasy comedy The Canterville Ghost, the projects that connect most to her later work are a pair of 1983 Agatha Christie adaptations. What better way to study the mechanics of mystery writing than by interpreting and updating stories by the genre’s greatest practitioner?
In Sparkling Cyanide, Grafton and her husband Steven Humphrey (along with co-writer Robert Malcolm Young) transport Christie’s 1945 novel to 1980s Los Angeles, complete with big-haired characters driving convertibles, set to a soft-jazz score. Produced for CBS, Sparkling Cyanide is not all that far off from a police procedural of the same era, and director Robert Michael Lewis furthers the connection by casting Dragnet star Harry Morgan as the police detective investigating the central murders.
Christie’s recurring character Colonel Race is the main investigator in the novel, but here he’s replaced by Morgan’s Captain Kemp, who often ends up as more of a tagalong than the lead detective. Instead, the friends and family of initial victim Rosemary Barton (Christine Belford) take the initiative to investigate her murder, which is tentatively labeled a suicide. Rosemary dramatically keels over at a fancy restaurant after drinking a champagne toast to her anniversary with her husband George (Josef Sommer).
Of course, everyone at the table had a potential motive for wanting Rosemary dead, and Sparkling Cyanide mixes its classical Christie mystery with the campy style of a contemporary nighttime soap. When Captain Kemp arrives on the scene of Rosemary’s murder, Lewis presents a series of close-ups on the face of each suspect, summarizing the players for the sake of the audience. Grafton and her collaborators retain the plotting of Christie’s novel, offering up clues at regular intervals until the inevitable reveal of the truth as the characters are gathered in the living room of George and Rosemary’s Pasadena mansion.
It’s not Captain Kemp who lays out the solution, though, but rather mysterious and debonair British journalist Tony Browne (Anthony Andrews), who’s been romancing Rosemary’s sister Iris (Deborah Raffin). Their burgeoning relationship gets nearly as much screen time as the murder mystery, and Andrews and Raffin play it with goofy charm, including a bizarre park scene in which they have a picnic lunch of chardonnay and cheese puffs.
Later, Tony and Iris go waterskiing, where Iris is nearly killed after being rammed by a boat — a very 1980s activity that replaces the novel’s more mundane attempt on Iris’ life via car accident. There are multiple romantic subplots for the other characters, including an affair between Rosemary and married political candidate Stephen Farraday (David Huffman), and a flirtation between George’s assistant Ruth Lessing (Pamela Bellwood) and Rosemary’s sleazy cousin Victor Drake (Michael Woods). It’s not hard to imagine these character returning week after week to seduce and betray each other like the characters on Dallas or Dynasty.
With a second murder that occurs around its midpoint, Sparkling Cyanide is even structured a bit like a double episode of a nighttime soap, although it never gets too far away from the mechanics of mystery-solving. It’s another demonstration of the malleability of Christie’s stories, which can be molded into various styles without losing their essential appeal. That would have been a valuable lesson for Grafton to take forward.
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Josh Bell is a freelance writer and movie/TV critic based in Las Vegas. He’s the former film editor of Las Vegas Weekly and the former TV comedies guide for About.com. He has written about movies, TV, and pop culture for Vulture, IndieWire, CBR, Inverse, Crooked Marquee, and more. With comedian Jason Harris, he co-hosts the podcast Awesome Movie Year.