Murder She Said (1961)

Jane Marple (Margaret Rutherford) witnesses a murder from her train window but the police find no evidence. So she poses as a domestic in a fancy manor house and does some investigating.

Joan Hickson plays a cook in a very small role, and would later go on to play Miss Marple for the BBC. I recently watched all of those episodes which includes a version of this story.

In the original story (4:50 from Paddington) and the Hickson BBC version the witness on the train, the investigating domestic, and Miss Marple are three different people. Combining them into one character is classic Hollywood and a reasonable cinematic decision, I think. The love interest part had to be removed for obvious reasons.

Murder She Said is the first of four Rutherford Marple films, and a box office success. Despite the lack of mystery, I rather enjoyed it. It’s a fairly complex story and the filmmakers did a good job of condensing it into a 90 minute runtime without watering it down. Rutherford's force of nature is a very different Marple than Hickson's accidental helper, and I’ll likely see more of them. AMRU 3.