Exploring the “Poirot” restoration

2020-09-20

[This post doesn’t contain any spoilers, but the linked episode posts definitely do!]

I love mysteries, and lately I’ve been taking it back to the source: “the Queen of Crime,” Agatha Christie. As author Linwod Barclay puts it, “all of us who write crime fiction owe her as great a debt as we do the inventor of the printing press.”Contains spoilers for various stories: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/agatha-christie-genius-or-hack-crime-writers-pass-judgment-and-pick-favourites-1.2351699

Most of her stories feature one of two detectives: Jane Marple or Hercule Poirot. For Miss Marple there are at least two very good portrayals: Margaret Rutherford is funny and boisterous, and Joan Hickson plays her serious and restrained. Pick your poison.

For Poirot, though, there’s really only David Suchet in “Agatha Christie’s Poirot.” Many great actors have played Poirot (Orson Welles, José Ferrer, John Malkovich, Peter Ustinov, Alfred Molina, the list goes on…) but ask a fan to read a Poirot story and I bet you it’s David Suchet in their mind’s eye. If you’re planning to watch “Murder on the Orient Express,” for example, definitely start – and maybe stop – with the Suchet version.

I started watching DVD versions (released by Grenada) a couple years back, and at some point I switched to HD/Blu-Ray (released by ITVMaybe familiar to us non-UK viewers mostly from “Love Island”

). The HD versions were restored and it shows: the modernist/Art Deco apartments are even more gorgeous, stolen gems sparkle brighter, etc. But sometimes when I watched an episode that I’d seen before, I’d have a jarring sense that things I loved about an episode were now gone. Shadowy figures were now sometimes brightly lit. Some of the mysterious atmosphere was less mysterious. And there was often something I couldn’t put my finger on: certain moods felt lost or diminished to me.

I’m going to try in a series of posts to put my finger on it.

The details: the restoration seems to be of the first 6 series (45 episodes). These were the ones that were shorter (usually under an hour), mostly of Christie’s earlier stories, and were shot on 16mm film. 16mm is a lower-resolution format than 35mm, but it’s got its own charms. “Leaving Las Vegas” and “Moonrise Kingdom” were both shot entirely in 16mm because of its unique look, and “Da 5 Bloods” recently made Chadwick Boseman appropriately angelic in 16mm flashbacks.

I’ll just be selecting things that seem interesting: this won’t be any kind of complete list of differences. I’m hoping that over the course of writing I’ll end up dipping into color science, cinematography, and other areas to try to crack the code of what’s changed. I’ll also only be focussing on the video, not on the audio which was also restored.

Here’s my ambitious schedule of a new episode exploration every Sunday. Feel free to follow along!:

We then jump out of chronological/series order for Christmas:

Then back to our regularly scheduled programming: