Alas, the next movie I ran was almost as dull: a British mystery called Death at the Bar — originally a 1940 novel by Ngaio (pronounced “nigh-oh”) Marsh, a mystery writer who, though originally from New Zealand (that first name sounds Maori), lived and worked most of her life in England and set most of her stories there. The “sleuth” character this time is chief inspector Roderick Alleyn (Patrick Malahide), who is based at Scotland Yard in London but in this case is working in a small town in central England when he stumbles on the murder of Luke Waterman (Kevin McNally), a celebrated barrister (what the British call a criminal lawyer — they call a business lawyer a “solicitor”) who successfully defended a notorious swindler and got him acquitted by putting the whole blame on his partner, Thringle. It’s hard at first to discern much of a dramatic pattern behind the events of this movie — it begins literally on a dark and stormy night, and Marsh and screenwriter Alfred Shaughnessy throw so many characters at us so fast it’s hard to tell who they are, how they relate to each other, and who the likely victim or the likely killer is going to be. It turns out that Waterman was killed as part of an elaborate William Tell-like ritual in which he was obliged to put his hand up against a dartboard and spread out his fingers while a middle-aged visitor named Robert Legge (David Calder) threw darts at him and landed them between his fingers — until the very last dart Legge threw hit him and he died shortly thereafter, after barmaid Decima Pomeroy (Kate Hardie) grabbed a glass at random from off the bar and tried to revive him with it.
There’s a wide pool of suspects, including actors Sebastian Parish (Alex Jennings) and Norman Cubitt (Ben Daniels), who are pretty obviously drawn as a Gay couple — in one scene they’re shown in a room together, stripping down to their underwear and about to get into bed together while they listen to Ray Noble’s record of “The Very Thought of You” before Sebastian is suddenly called away for an interview about the case: Sebastian was the late Luke Waterman’s cousin and he and Cubitt jointly inherited his fortune — as well as Decima herself and her “townie” boyfriend Will Moore (Mark Anstee), who works on boats in this seaside town (the imdb.com “Trivia” page identifies the location as “Cornwall, England” — actually Cornwall is in Wales) and who was fiercely jealous of Waterman because Decima would get together with him for a “fling” whenever he visited. Not having read Marsh’s novel I have no idea whether the dementedly non-linear presentation of the story was her idea or that of Shaughnessy or director Michael Winterbottom — scenes from that 10-year-old trial are cut in so baldly at first I thought they were scenes from the murder trial of the usual obvious (but innocent) suspect in the current crime, and the film is frequently flashing back even worse than in most mystery movies — but after a very long 100 minutes the truth emerges.
At first Inspector Alleyn and his Watson-like sidekick Inspector Fox (William Simons) think Legge was the murderer, but then they realize that cyanide is a poison that evaporates quickly when exposed to air and therefore the traces of it on the dart that struck Waterman had to have been added after, not before, Waterman died. Alleyn concludes that Waterman was really killed by poison poured into the drink Decima gave him, supposedly to revive him, and after having successfully steered suspicion away from Legge with that cyanide-evaporates-too-rapidly bit Alleyn eventually decides Legge is the killer after all. At first the only motive we can think of was the fender-bender we witnessed between Waterman’s fancy red sports car and Legge’s more prosaic saloon (what the British call a sedan) as Waterman was driving into town for his latest visit, but later we learn through fingerprints (a form of identification Scotland Yard pioneered in 1902, by the way) that Legge was really Thringle, the co-defendant in the case Waterman tried 10 years before and blamed the entire crime on so Thringle’s co-defendant so the other defendant was acquitted and Thringle got a seven-year sentence.
When I looked this up on imdb.com the review that came up was one by “tedg,” who pointed out the defect of British mystery TV shows in general and this one in particular: “The problem is that these are mysteries and the way the mystery component is handled is dreadful, ordinarily. What they turn into is a storytelling form that has a surprise ending that we know is coming. We aren't given enough clues to guess; we aren't supposed to. We are just supposed to enjoy the dessert when served.” “Tedg” praised director Winterbottom for enlivening this one more than usual, but it’s still pretty dull and Roderick Alleyn was so boring a character that, while the other shows the BBC was creating around great fictional detectives from famous writers (like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple) or original characters like Inspectors Morse and Lewis lasted for years or even decades, Alleyn Mysteries lasted for only seven episodes, a pilot film from 1990 and six episodes spaced out over two years, 1993-1994. (This one is listed on imdb.com as 1993 because that was the year it premiered on the BBC, but the copyright date is 1992.) I was also confused as to when this was supposed to have taken place; Marsh published the source novel in 1940 and specified that it took place two years before that, but it had more of the “feel” of an immediately post-World War II story than an immediately pre-war one to me.
