The Mirror Crack'd (1980)

A Hollywood production sweeps into St Mary Mead and brings with it highly-strung celebrity A-lister Marina Gregg (Elizabeth Taylor), her arm-candy husband (Rock Hudson), their entourage of secretaries and house people and production staff and, among them, a murderer, and it is up to Angela Lansbury's terrible Miss Marple, an American-accented beanpole covered in cobwebs, to solve the poisoning cases central to Agatha Christie's classic mystery.

★★★☆☆

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The Count of Monte Cristo (1975)

Probably all film adaptations of Alexandre Dumas' classic revenge story, the roughly 1000-page brick The Count of Monte Cristo, need to abridge characters and subplots in order to fit something sensible into a movie runtime, so this entertaining 1975 made-for-tv adaptation needs to be excused for dispensing of one of my favourite of Dumas' eighteen chapter releases, the episode introducing the electrifying Luigi Vampa, leader of a band of Italian smugglers, and probably noone can blame the movie for letting the intensity of Edmond Dantés' love for Mercedes extinguish long before their very late reunion - there is just too much other stuff to cover - but can anyone forgive the movie Richard Chamberlain's Count's whitened and slicked back 'do or the poster's redundant hyphen?

★★★☆☆

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