Simply an amazing film. I am impressed especially with Ben Miller's acting. The guy delivers such intensity and the character is entirely believable.
I for one am impressed. But then, I am normally impressed with the product of the Brits.
Semper Fidelis,
Sean
Annapolis, MD
[deleted]
He is let off because Ivy tells the court that he was with her at the time, but is then convicted of the murder of Denny, who he didn't murder.
shareWhen the police inspector took away Dr Bickleigh's incubator, in which he was trying unsuccessfully to cultivate botulism, the police found evidence of typhoid growing there - probably without Bickleigh even realising. When Denny later died of typhoid, the police make a wrong assumption that Bickleigh had poisoned Denny... and so he hasn't a leg to stand on.
I remember at the end of the 1979 Hywel Bennett version of Malice Aforethought, Dr Bickleigh protested "It was the drains - I kept telling her to get the drains repaired" rather than incriminating himself as he did in the 2005 version by saying "He ate the wrong sandwiches" which implied that the "right" sandwiches were poisoned.
The doctor did murder Denny. His target was his lover, who was blabbing about his having said his wife was dead before he should have known about it, but he also detested her husband and Ivy's husband, so he may have wanted to off all three of them. He intended to culture botulism, but belatedly discovered that it dies when exposed to air, so he apparently accidentally cultured the typhoid that killed Denny -- it showed a fly landing on his cultures when he was interrupted by the detective. Se la vie.
shareI'm not so sure that Dr Bickleigh did kill Denny.
He certainly wanted to kill everyone that he invited to tea. That's why he prepared two sets of sandwiches: one set unadulterated for himself and the other set modified with what he thought was botulism but which turned out to be typhoid. Sure enough, those people who ate the typhoid sandwiches suffered food poisoning symptoms overnight, but they all survived.
But Denny didn't eat any typhoid sandwiches. Now of course there could have been cross-contamination between the two sets of sandwiches. But remember how Dr Bickleigh rebuked Madeleine about the state of the kitchen at her house and said that she could get typhoid – this was in the very early days, long before he'd planned to kill anyone.
That is the final irony: the death of Denny really was an accident and was the one death that Dr Bickleigh was not guilty of causing.
A vastly inferior remake to the 1979 Hywell Bennet dramatisation. The cast did not appear to me at all believable. In the original, it was possible to feel sympathy for the doctor, for all his felony, and as so often the case, the BBC castings were superb. This time, the supporting cast were almost cardboard cut outs.
For some reason, the director loved shots with the foreground blurred and out of focus. Even a close up of a Durex condom. In 1929?
I just wish the original 197 Malice Aforethought would become available!