Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Death in the Clouds, kind of

Having read Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie last week I thought I'd watch the Poirot TV adaptation starring David Suchet.  None the first ten to fifteen minutes of the adaptation, which was based in Paris and the French Open tennis tournament, appeared in the book.  The number of plane passengers was cut from eleven to eight; Japp travels to Paris; and on it goes.  None of the changes were necessary.  The book could have been adapted as published.  In particular there was no need to mess with the plot or the dialogue, which Christie excels at.  It's becoming something of a recurring theme for me to lament scriptwriters radically altering stories.  The only I times I can see the merit is to cut the length or to address a flaw.  Neither were required in this case.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Rob - I couldn't agree with you more. I've watched several of the Poirot adaptations. Some of them were more faithful than others and in some cases the adaptations make some sense. In this case, I agree completely that those changes added nothing to the story.