Silver Screen Standards: The Mirror Crack’d (1980)
While it’s not actually a film from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the 1980 Miss Marple whodunnit, The Mirror Crack’d, is set in 1953 and boasts a cast of powerhouse classic stars from that era, including Angela Lansbury as Agatha Christie’s iconic detective. It belongs to the vogue for lavish, star-studded Christie adaptations that produced Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978) and preceded Kenneth Branagh’s revival of those Hercule Poirot adventures starting in 2017. Of course, we can trace the roots of Rian Johnson’s tremendously successful Benoit Blanc movies to these pictures, too, so it’s well worth the effort to revisit the earlier Christie adaptations in order to better appreciate the evolution and enduring appeal of this particular subgenre of murder mystery. The Mirror Crack’d is especially suited to the interests of classic movie fans because its plot revolves around movie actors and filmmaking, with Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Kim Novak, Tony Curtis, and Geraldine Chaplin enthusiastically skewering the stereotypical characters of their own industry. While Hollywood has certainly produced more lauded Christie adaptations, The Mirror Crack’d remains one of my personal favorites for its cast and the opportunity to see Angela Lansbury tackle a different detective from the one she famously played on the television series, Murder, She Wrote (1984-1996).
Taking its title from Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott,” The Mirror Crack’d sees Miss Marple’s village, St. Mary Mead, in a flutter over the Hollywood crowd who are in town to shoot a movie about Mary, Queen of Scots, starring celebrated actress Marina Gregg (Elizabeth Taylor). Miss Marple (Angela Lansbury) twists an ankle and misses the party where a local guest suddenly dies, but that doesn’t stop her from investigating the crime with some help from her maid, Cherry (Wendy Morgan), and her nephew, Inspector Dermot Craddock of Scotland Yard (Edward Fox). Soon, it looks like Marina must have been the intended target, but her circle includes many suspects who might have a motive for wanting her dead.
The cast of this picture is just packed with A-list stars, even in places you might not expect them. Angela Lansbury was only 55 when she played the elderly Miss Marple, but makeup and costume help her look decades older than Elizabeth Taylor, who was really just seven years younger than Lansbury. The pair had even played sisters in National Velvet (1944), which was Lansbury’s second screen role and the fifth for Taylor. Due to Miss Marple’s injury, the two leading ladies don’t get much screen time together in this picture, but Taylor does have lots of scenes with Rock Hudson, who plays her husband/director, Jason Rudd, and with Kim Novak, who plays her hated rival, Lola Brewster. Taylor and Novak lean into the trope of rival actresses who absolutely loathe one another, trading barbs and loaded lines in every scene they share. Tony Curtis is also hamming it up in his role as the film’s shallow, jaded producer, Marty Fenn, leaving Hudson’s character as the only likeable one of the group, which partly explains the devotion of his loyal assistant, Ella (Geraldine Chaplin). The supporting players include a number of well-known English actors, including Edward Fox and Charles Gray, and you will even find a very young Pierce Brosnan making his second screen appearance in an uncredited but easily spotted role. Of the less familiar actors, Fox gives an especially fun performance as Miss Marple’s nephew, who gushes about movies like a true film fan but also uses his knowledge to help his investigation.
Lansbury is another in a long line of actresses to play Miss Marple, from Margaret Rutherford and Helen Hayes to Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan, and Julia McKenzie, and of course fans have their favorite incarnations (personally I like both McEwan and McKenzie very much). While it’s true that Lansbury was really too young for the part in 1980, she’s such a dedicated actress that I think she manages to be convincing, even though it would have been fascinating to have her return to the role several decades later, perhaps around the time she appeared in Nanny McPhee (2005). Lansbury’s career saw her tackle a wide variety of roles on film, stage, and television, but she has a special place in the mystery genre thanks to her long-running role as Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote, and it’s worth noting that her very last screen appearance was a cameo as one of Benoit Blanc’s friends in Glass Onion (2022). Unlike Peter Ustinov, who got to play Hercule Poirot six times between 1978 and 1986, Lansbury only played Miss Marple once, perhaps because The Mirror Crack’d didn’t do very well at the box office. That’s a shame, too, because Christie wrote so many great Miss Marple mysteries that don’t sideline the heroine with an injury, and it would have been wonderful to see Lansbury put more of her own stamp on the role in adaptations of The Murder at the Vicarage, A Pocket Full of Rye, or Sleeping Murder. Lansbury does, however, appear in a different Agatha Christie adaptation, the 1978 version of Death on the Nile with Ustinov as Poirot, in which Lansbury appears as Salome Otterbourne.
Agatha Christie’s works continue to inspire new adaptations, including the most recent 2026 Netflix miniseries, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, but the best classic movie adaptation of a Christie story is the gripping 1957 version of Witness for the Prosecution starring Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, and Charles Laughton. For more of my favorite Angela Lansbury films, see Gaslight (1944), The Harvey Girls (1946), The Court Jester (1955), and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). For more star-studded mysteries, check out The Last of Sheila (1973), Gosford Park (2001), and the 2025 Netflix adaptation of Richard Osman’s novel, The Thursday Murder Club. I don’t want to spoil a major plot twist, but I will close by mentioning that certain events in the 1962 novel, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, and the 1980 adaptation closely resemble a real-life Hollywood tragedy involving Gene Tierney that many classic films fans will recognize immediately.
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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
