Potty Old Party

Murder, She Said (M-G-M), "I'm the new maid." At this apparently innocuous announcement, the lady of the house looks up to smile a welcome. Her jaw drops. In the doorway stands a domestic disaster. The torso suggests a pup tent full of Jell-0, the hair looks like something dumped out of a vacuum cleaner, the chin resembles the business end of an ax, the eyes slide around like eggs on a plate, the tiny mouth might almost be a third nostril. The legs--it somehow comes as a surprise that there are only two of them--look like snaggled paper clips jabbed into erasers, and when they walk the blubber above them wobbles with a sly, sidewise, fidgety motion: the poor thing appears to be fighting down an exceptionally irksome set of drawers.

What is it? It is a potty old party, the very model of what the aitch-adding British call a "maiden haunt." It is Comedienne Margaret Rutherford, 69 and still going strong (Passport to Pimlico; I'm All Right, Jack], and in this adaptation of an Agatha Christie chiller called 4:50 from Paddington she has a role that is custom-tailored to her somewhat peculiar measure.

She plays Miss Marple, a sort of dowager-detective who takes the 4:50 train from Paddington Station one afternoon and, happening to glance up from the whodunit she is wolfing, sees a woman being strangled in a passing train. Murder, she says to the police, but they only smile indulgently. Miss Marple gets her back up. "If you think I am going to sit back." she bellows, "and let everybody regard me as a dotty old maid, you are very much mistaken!"

Whereupon the indomitable frump hauls on her baggy tweeds, takes up her trusty golf clubs ("Must keep fit, you know"), and stomps forth to see justice done. In the process, she takes a position as maid-of-all-work in Ackenthorpe Hall, a grim old grange about an hour from London, where she not only discovers the strangled woman's body in the Egyptian sarcophagus--the one that every English country house is fitted out with--tut even grubs up two more fine fresh stiffs. And of course in the end the old bag bags the killer. Best shot: Actress Rutherford stuffed in a French maid's uniform (black bombazine with a white lace apron tied at the back in a pretty little winglike bow) and looking for all the world like a hippopotamus trying to play Titania.

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