Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsTook the story and removed its teeth...
Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2017
I'd watched this the evening after I finished reading the book, which may have been a mistake. I enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes short story after the movie ended far more than the movie itself, as a result, because I couldn't help feeling that the movie took all the teeth out of the book.
SPOILERS:
- In the book, everybody was guilty of the crimes of which they were accused, and by the end, everyone is actually dead. This is... kind of integral to the plot. By making the two (good-looking) people in the movie innocent and making it so they both live... it kind of ruined the entire story. Also, in the movie, the person Vera supposedly killed was an adult, not a child as it was in the book, which changes her entire characterization.
- In the book, the first person to die is Tony Marston, who is described as young, incredibly good looking, and is often likened to a Nordic god. He was guilty of running over and killing two children while speeding (he had absolutely no remorse for this). In the movie, rather inexplicably, they change him to this weaselly Russian prince guy. And no mention of the fact that they were children. It's as though audiences at the time were incapable of figuring out that good-looking people are also capable of being morally bankrupt. I kind of got the impression that this was important to the story, and between how they treated Tony, and how they treated Vera and Lombard, the movie completely turned this theme upside-down.
- A really cool feature of the book is that there is an extra mystery at the end, of how the killer managed to completely flummox the investigators. He went to extraordinary lengths to make his suicide match with the account of how he died, leaving no visible sign that he actually died at the end, and not in the middle, as the diary entries would leave the investigators to believe. This is a key part of his characterization... the fact that he really wanted to confuse the investigation afterwards, and how he had it all planned out.
It wasn't all bad. I did like the change they made to Ms Brent's character... if anything, that made her worse (in a good way). And some of the comedy was enjoyable, if out of place. (Although why anybody would think that it's "strange" that a butler would get drunk after his wife died, some mystery person was threatening to kill him, and a lot of people were accusing him of being the killer, is beyond me). And the movie was interesting when viewed as a piece of history.
Again, after the movie is over, they show a Sherlock Holmes story, which I enjoyed. Don't know how much of that is due to it being good, vs. the fact that I had NOT read the story it was based on just before watching, but it was fun.