by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the KPBS telecast
of the episode “The Labors of Hercules” from the series
Agatha Christie’s Poirot, a story I had quirky memories of because in the
1960’s my mother and I checked the book out of the library but never actually
read it. The title would seem to be a pun on Hercule Poirot’s name and his “labors”
in solving crimes, but it actually refers to a famous series of 12 paintings
based on the mythical labors of Hercules (whose real name, by the way, was
Herakles — he was the son of Hera, queen of the gods and wife of Zeus, who
apparently got tired of Zeus cheating on her with just about every woman who
would hold still for him, often turning himself into swans, showers of gold or
whatnot, as well as having a Gay boy-toy servant named Ganymede whose name
became “cover” for several generations of Gay men the way the phrase “friend of
Dorothy” — a reference to The Wizard of Oz — did later, that she decided what was sauce for the gander was sauce
for the goose and she’d cheat on him for a change). The paintings have been disappearing from the musea and
private collections that housed them, courtesy of a mysterious art thief named
Mariscal (at least I think that was the name — it got pronounced several different ways in a show
that featured so many British actors doing bad Continental accents it was
really tough to listen to). Poirot shows up at the Olympus (get the pun?)
resort in Switzerland where Mariscal is supposedly hiding out, and everyone
thinks he’s there to catch him, but he’s really been sent by a British
cabdriver named Ted Williams [Tom Austen] (presumably Christie wrote this
before the genuinely famous Ted Williams, the U.S. baseball player, emerged)
who had an affair with Nina, maid to a famous ballerina named Lucinda Le
Mesurier (Lorna Nickson Brown) whose character seems to have been copied from
Garbo’s role in Grand Hotel, since she’s given up her career, become a recluse and is under the
care of a sinister psychiatrist, Dr. Lutz (played by author and critic Simon
Callow, of all people). Poirot is also there to resume his acquaintance with a
former girlfriend, Countess Rossakoff (Orla Brady), and while he’s there he
uncovers a sting operation being pulled by two sisters who pose as mother and
daughter — when the older one isn’t posing as a man and luring young men into
their trap by claiming to be the younger one’s abusive husband (I’m not making
this up, you know!) — and discovers at the end that virtually everyone at the hotel is crooked in one way or another, and
that Mariscal, who’s been described as a psychopathic killer as well as an art
thief, is really the Countess’s daughter, Alice Cunningham (Eleanor Tomlinson).
It also turns out that Dr. Lutz is in on the plot to steal not only the 12
“Labors of Hercules” paintings but some precious jewels as well — exactly how he’s involved remains a mystery but we do get a marvelous moment when he asks Poirot why he
always refers to himself in the third person, and gets the preposterous answer,
“It helps me keep myself separate from my genius.” (Huh?) Some of the other Poirot episodes have been acceptable and even engaging
light entertainments, but not this one; it’s a bore from start to finish,
suffering even more than usual from the general problem with Christie’s
writing: too many characters and not enough development of any of them. It’s
one of those stories I call, not a “whodunit” but a “whocareswhodunit.”
