At Bertram's Hotel
- Episode aired Sep 23, 2007
- TV-PG
- 1h 24m
IMDb RATING
7.3/10
1.7K
YOUR RATING
Miss Marple's stay at a glamorous London hotel is interrupted by a wave of criminal activity, including robberies, racketeering, blackmail, death threats, and cold-blooded murder.Miss Marple's stay at a glamorous London hotel is interrupted by a wave of criminal activity, including robberies, racketeering, blackmail, death threats, and cold-blooded murder.Miss Marple's stay at a glamorous London hotel is interrupted by a wave of criminal activity, including robberies, racketeering, blackmail, death threats, and cold-blooded murder.
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- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaIn the opening minutes, as Miss Marple stares in wonderment at the lobby of Bertram's Hotel, the manager is on the phone and says, "It's the Festival of Britain, Mr. Porter," followed by, "Uh, no, I'm afraid Miss Otis regrets she's unable to lunch today." The line is from the 1934 Cole Porter song "Miss Otis Regrets" performed by many artists including Ella Fitzgerald and 'Nat 'King' Cole', and more recently by Bette Midler on the final episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962).
- Goofs"When the inspector and the maid are on the roof, the view is of the Houses of Parliament with St Paul's Cathedral behind and to the left, St Paul's is about two miles east of the Houses of Parliament."
If the camera were looking due north, then St. Paul's should appear to the right of Big Ben but the view is to the east-northeast and all the buildings are exactly where they should be. Almost everything behind Big Ben in this view is to the east. (St. Paul's is actually 3 km northeast of Parliament.)
- Quotes
Miss Marple: Who sends a written death threat? Surely not someone who truly intends to kill the recipient. It's common sense not to warn them.
- SoundtracksAnything Goes
Words and music by Cole Porter
Featured review
Where's Miss Marple?
Where'd Miss Marple go? She checked into Bertram's Hotel and disappeared.
Once upon a time Agatha Christie invented a small-village spinster who was also a busybody who solved crimes that baffled the police by observing human nature and finding parallels between folks in a small town and in the wider world. Why not? Having been a small-town denizen all my life I find it plausible. People are the same everywhere. As we Americans express it, all are created equal.
In this pastiche of Christie flying under the title AT BERTRAM'S HOTEL, Francesca Annis ("Partners in Crime," "Why Didn't They Ask Evans"), Polly Walker ("Peril at End House") and Peter Davison ("A Pocket Full of Rye") are also stuck (the last two fortunately minimalized; don't watch this show for them).
I won't compare this to the earlier version because there's no comparison between that and this yarn of Nazis and stolen art (too serious a subject to make fun of) solved by . . . Someone other than this perpetually-smiling little fraud masquerading as nosy Jessica Marple.
It's as if they looked at the older version (which, frankly, as I say, I never cared for, either, this not being one of my favorite Christie books) and said, This has been done, let's do something else but keep the title.
I've known novels improved by movies that trimmed subplots, combined characters, and generally streamlined stories in ways that should have occurred to the authors in the first place. I've seen bad novels given new life by adaptations that gave rotten stories a wholesale facelift (as in Hitchcock's "Family Plot") I've seen good novels wrecked like two locomotives smashing together. But I've never seen a farrago quite like this, where the nominal detective takes a back seat in the roller coaster. Don't the people behind this series like little old ladies?
Why bother shoehorning Miss Marple into stories where she doesn't belong (like "Towards Zero" and "The Secret of Chimneys") and pull her fangs here? (Though I will admit I like the inexplicable Marple-invasion version of "The Sittaford Mystery," a favorite Christie mystery where little Miss Marple lost her way and blundered in by mistake. Sure, the out-and-out flummery this series commits occasionally works--a stopped clock is right twice a day). But pulling the wool over our eyes and repeating this is Christie fools no one this time. It's a misfire from the start. It crashes as burns and deservedly so.
As I said, I don't even like this book. I liked the faithful older adaptation no better than this cockeyed one. So why does it matter to me? Well, someone wrote an angry review mentioning the stoning in the "Poirot" version of "Murder on the Orient Express" and saying how awful Christie was for writing it; but Christie didn't write it. She got pilloried for something she didn't do. That's why fidelity (even the pretense of it) matters. Christie wrote some brilliant stuff and she wrote some stupid stuff but she doesn't deserve to be blamed for junk attributed to but not perpetrated by her. Like this.
Nothing about this adaptation makes much sense. But unlike Jessica Marple it's fast and pretty and maybe that's enough to get you through the night.
Once upon a time Agatha Christie invented a small-village spinster who was also a busybody who solved crimes that baffled the police by observing human nature and finding parallels between folks in a small town and in the wider world. Why not? Having been a small-town denizen all my life I find it plausible. People are the same everywhere. As we Americans express it, all are created equal.
In this pastiche of Christie flying under the title AT BERTRAM'S HOTEL, Francesca Annis ("Partners in Crime," "Why Didn't They Ask Evans"), Polly Walker ("Peril at End House") and Peter Davison ("A Pocket Full of Rye") are also stuck (the last two fortunately minimalized; don't watch this show for them).
I won't compare this to the earlier version because there's no comparison between that and this yarn of Nazis and stolen art (too serious a subject to make fun of) solved by . . . Someone other than this perpetually-smiling little fraud masquerading as nosy Jessica Marple.
It's as if they looked at the older version (which, frankly, as I say, I never cared for, either, this not being one of my favorite Christie books) and said, This has been done, let's do something else but keep the title.
I've known novels improved by movies that trimmed subplots, combined characters, and generally streamlined stories in ways that should have occurred to the authors in the first place. I've seen bad novels given new life by adaptations that gave rotten stories a wholesale facelift (as in Hitchcock's "Family Plot") I've seen good novels wrecked like two locomotives smashing together. But I've never seen a farrago quite like this, where the nominal detective takes a back seat in the roller coaster. Don't the people behind this series like little old ladies?
Why bother shoehorning Miss Marple into stories where she doesn't belong (like "Towards Zero" and "The Secret of Chimneys") and pull her fangs here? (Though I will admit I like the inexplicable Marple-invasion version of "The Sittaford Mystery," a favorite Christie mystery where little Miss Marple lost her way and blundered in by mistake. Sure, the out-and-out flummery this series commits occasionally works--a stopped clock is right twice a day). But pulling the wool over our eyes and repeating this is Christie fools no one this time. It's a misfire from the start. It crashes as burns and deservedly so.
As I said, I don't even like this book. I liked the faithful older adaptation no better than this cockeyed one. So why does it matter to me? Well, someone wrote an angry review mentioning the stoning in the "Poirot" version of "Murder on the Orient Express" and saying how awful Christie was for writing it; but Christie didn't write it. She got pilloried for something she didn't do. That's why fidelity (even the pretense of it) matters. Christie wrote some brilliant stuff and she wrote some stupid stuff but she doesn't deserve to be blamed for junk attributed to but not perpetrated by her. Like this.
Nothing about this adaptation makes much sense. But unlike Jessica Marple it's fast and pretty and maybe that's enough to get you through the night.
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- aramis-112-804880
- Apr 26, 2023
Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Language
- Also known as
- Miss Marple: At Bertram's Hotel
- Filming locations
- Polesden Lacey, Great Bookham, Dorking, Surrey, England, UK(interiors: hotel reception/gallery/other rooms)
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- Runtime1 hour 24 minutes
- Color
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