Agatha Christie's Marple: Complete Series 5 [Blu-ray] Reviews

Agatha Christie introduced her elderly spinster sleuth Miss Jane Marple in a series of six 1928 short stories, but it wasn’t until 1930 in the cozy village mystery Murder at the Vicarage that she achieved more international exposure. Though the character is today wildly popular, Christie trotted her out only occasionally between those first efforts and her last appearance in a novel in 1976’s Sleeping Murder. There were only twelve full length Jane Marple mysteries ever written plus a handful of short stories. Despite this paucity of viable material, Miss Marple has been appearing in theatrical films and made-for-television movies for almost five decades, often in adaptations of the Marple books but occasionally in either original plots or efforts where the character has been inserted into one of Mrs. Christie’s mysteries that originally didn’t feature Jane Marple at all. At this stage of her cinematic career, all of Miss Marple’s novel-length adventures have been filmed at least once, so as has been the case in the previous series of Marple features which starred Geraldine McEwan, only one of these four films in this set is based on an actual Marple novel. Of the other three, two insert Miss Marple into a thriller in which she didn’t originally appear, and, at long last, one of the Miss Marple short stories has been chosen to be dramatized. These four Miss Maple adventures are the first introduction of the character in high definition, and the fourth volume in this set, The Pale Horse, was not released on DVD previously as the other three volumes in this set were. 

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