Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		3.5

Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime Blu-ray Movie Review

The Not-So-Thin Man and His Curious Wife

Reviewed by Michael Reuben January 5, 2016

Agatha Christie's best known detectives are Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, but the prolific author didn't stop there. Among her lesser known creations are Thomas and Prudence Beresford, bickering married sleuths popularly known as "Tommy and Tuppence". Throughout her career, Christie revisited Tommy and Tuppence as their lives progressed, first introducing them as young adults in the 1922 novel, The Secret Adversary, and paying them a final visit as an old married couple in 1973's Postern of Fate, the last book Christie completed before her death. In all, the "Tommy and Tuppence" collection includes four novels and a collection of short stories entitled Partners in Crime.

In 1982-1983, Tommy and Tuppence appeared on London Weekend Television in a feature-length adaptation of The Secret Adversary and a ten-part series covering their remaining adventures. Over the next thirty years, however, the characters were largely overshadowed by British television's successful Poirot and Marple adaptations. In 2014, the Agatha Christie Group decided to reinvent the characters for a new audience. The result was the six-part series, Partners in Crime, which aired on the BBC from July 26 through August 30, 2015, and is now being released on Blu-ray by Acorn Media. (Both Acorn and the Agatha Christie Group are co-owned by RLJ Entertainment.)

The new series of Partners in Crime is based on Christie's first "Tommy and Tuppence" novel, The Secret Adversary, published in 1922, and her third, N or M?, published in 1941. Both stories have been re-set in the 1950s and their plots retooled for the Cold War conflict, which gives the new Partners in Crime both a thematic continuity and a consistent visual design. Just as the big-screen adaptation of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. celebrated the boldness of Sixties style, Partners in Crime pays homage to the quiet elegance of the preceding decade. As for Tommy and Tuppence, they are presented as a well-settled married couple with a son old enough to attend boarding school. Long-time familiarity allows them to work well together but also creates the kind of friction that leads to marital bickering. (A reference point for the series creators was the U.S. TV show, Hart to Hart.)

When we first meet Tommy (David Walliams) and Tuppence (Jessica Raine, Call the Midwife), they are attempting to start a business as beekeepers selling what we would now call "artisanal" honey. It's the first of several business ventures they will try during the course of the series. On a train from Paris, where the couple has traveled to acquire a special queen bee that Tommy is convinced will make their fortune, they encounter a young woman, Jane Finn (Camilla Beeput), who appears to be in trouble. Indeed, after sitting with the Beresfords briefly, Jane disappears, leaving her book behind. Tuppence, who is the more impulsive partner in the Beresford marriage, finds this incident far more interesting than beekeeping, and when she and Tommy return to their London home, she insists on pursuing it. This brings the Beresfords into contact with a wealthy American businessman, Julius Hersheimmer (Clarke Peters, The Wire), a purveyor of a new saccharine-like sweetener. Julius tells the Beresfords that he is Jane's uncle and will pay them to find her. As it happens, Tommy also has an uncle, Major Anthony Carter (James Fleet), who is a senior official in British intelligence. When Tommy and Tuppence consult Uncle Carter, they learn that Jane was one of his operatives, who was carrying valuable information.

Despite Uncle Carter's warnings to return to their beehives, the Beresfords continue investigating and quickly get themselves into trouble. They discover a group of dangerous thugs working out of a Soho betting shop and brothel that serves as a base of operations for a mysterious Soviet assassin known only as "Brown". An imperious opera singer named Rita Vandemeyer (Alice Krige) is somehow involved, and Tuppence is brazen enough to masquerade as the prima donna's "secretary", even though she can't type. Meanwhile, Tommy is mistaken by the Soho gang as an emissary from Brown and thereby stumbles into undercover work for which he is wholly unprepared.

A key aide to Tommy and Tuppence is Albert Pemberton (Matthew Steer), a former bomb disposal specialist in the war, who met Tommy while both were recovering in a military hospital. Barred from field work because of his missing hand, Albert has become a chemistry teacher who works as a part-time technical consultant for Carter. Through his friendship with Tommy, he senses an opportunity for a more active role in intelligence operations.

Albert's opportunity arrives some months after the conclusion of the "Brown" investigation, when a former university classmate, Gilbert Worthing (Danny Lee Wynter), disappears from a military base in Cromer, along with the top secret nuclear bomb on which he was working. Major Carter approaches Tommy to investigate the disappearance, because he suspects a leak among his regular staff. Tommy's job is to go undercover at the Sans Souci guest house near Cromer to identify a Soviet assassin code-named either "M" or "N", who claims to have kidnapped Worthing and threatens to detonate the bomb unless Her Majesty's government releases thirty Soviet spies and pays a ransom.

Although Uncle Carter instructs Tommy not to reveal his assignment to Tuppence, his wife knows Tommy too well not to suspect something. When Tommy arrives at the Sans Souci, he finds Tuppence already ensconced in her own undercover role. Together they begin prying into the lives of everyone in sight, including the sharp-tempered Irish landlady, Sheila Perenna (Aoife McMahon). The guests include a rakish young adventurer, Carl Denim (Ed Speleers), who flirts openly with Tuppence; a pretty widow, Mrs. Sprot (Christina Cole), who flirts openly with Tommy; Major Khan (Alyy Khan), who is shiftiness personified; a married pair of Jungian therapists named Minton (Issy Van Randwyck and Robert Hands); and a former British naval captain, Commander Haydock (Roy Marsden), who has a home nearby but is a frequent visitor to the inn.

Intrigue abounds among the guests, and so do misdeeds. Somewhere in the shadows lurks a silent and deadly blonde henchwoman (Hannah Waddingham). Whenever she appears, someone gets shot.

Partners in Crime is at its strongest when it focuses on the relationship between its two leads, both of whom are rank amateurs with good instincts, but amateurs nonetheless. Walliams and Raine create a credible and entertaining portrait of a conventional middle class marriage in which routine patterns are being shaken up by new experiences, sometimes to the partners' delight and sometimes to their dismay. Beneath the minor spats and petty jealousies lie deep feelings that emerge when either of the partners is in danger. Even routine dialogue acquires an extra layer of spice in the actors' delivery.

Where Partners suffers is in its investigations. Its plotting lacks the focus and complexity of other Agatha Christie adaptations. As a result, the pacing often drags, so that the story seems alternately to be marking time and then running to catch up with developments that the audience can already anticipate, even as Tommy and Tuppence are still working out the mystery. The issue is probably one of scripting, since both of the tales encompassed by Partners in Crime were substantially revised from the original Christie novels. In updating the books to the 1950s, something appears to have been lost. This may explain why, after an initially favorable response from both critics and the viewing public, Partners in Crime declined steadily in both ratings and critical regard. The BBC has not ordered a further season.

Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Partners in Crime was shot by cinematographer David Higgs (RockNRolla). As is typical of contemporary British TV, the production was photographed digitally. The six episodes have been evenly divided over two 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-rays, which were presumably sourced directly from digital files. The Blu-ray image ranks at the high end of Acorn's output, with clean and noiseless image featuring solid blacks and copious fine detail that showcases the period costumes and production design discussed at length in the set's extras. The post-production color grading has added a slight softening and a touch of desaturation to create a feel for the period when Britain was still rebuilding its economy after the war, but vibrant color still stands out from the frame, especially in Tuppence's elegant wardrobe (she is often the most colorful person in the scene). The show's creators wanted to balance a period-accurate look with a slightly heightened reality that would give Partners in Crime a sense of fun, and the Blu-ray image reflects that balance.

Acorn has mastered the episodes with an average bitrate of just over 24 Mbps, which is very good for digitally acquired material. The compression has been carefully done, and the image remains free of artifacts.

Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Partners in Crime arrives with a 5.1 soundtrack encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. The discrete format allows the sound designers a greater degree of precision in placing sound effects and creating distinct environments like the opening Paris train station or the beaches and pier near the San Souci guesthouse, but Partners in Crime is not an audio showcase. Guns are brandished far more than they are fired, and no car chases occur. Agatha Christie's world was made up of dialogue, which is delivered crisply and intelligibly. The energetic score was supplied by Tim Phillips (who scored the original U.K. Shameless).

Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Time Out with Clarke Peters (disc 1) (1080p; 1.78:1; 24:48): The actor talks about his long and versatile career in music, theater and television, which has been divided between the U.S. and Britain.



• The Styling of Partners in Crime: Fashioning the 1950s (disc 1) (1080p; 1.78:1; 31:48): A detailed examination of the look of the series, with segments on costumes, hair and makeup and production design. The departments were directed to look forward toward improving economic conditions, rather than backward toward the privation that followed the war's aftermath. They also took the poetic license of making Tommy and Tuppence more glamorous than the original scripts indicated.



• Partners in Crime Behind the Scenes (disc 2) (1080p; 1.78:1; 57:32): This in-depth review of the series takes it from development through filming, including location footage and interviews with many of the cast. Participants include Walliams and Raine, executive producer Hilary Bevan Jones of Endor Productions; Hilary Strong from the Agatha Christie Group; and Mathew Prichard, the author's grandson.



• Photo Gallery (1080p; various; 1:32): A slide show of production and behind-the-scenes photos.



• Introductory Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for Acorn TV, Poirot: Series 13 and Foyle's War, Set 8, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Partners in Crime has its problems, but I would have been happy to see the show's creators try to address them in dramatizing the remaining Tommy and Tuppence stories. Walliams and Raine are interesting to watch, both separately and together, and the production values are first rate. On the strength of those elements, plus Acorn Media's fine extras and Blu-ray quality, I give the set a qualified recommendation. Just don't expect Marple or Poirot.