I've been trying to get into reading mysteries lately, including classic Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929): one of her earlier works, while she's still fumbling around to create an ongoing amateur sleuth. A tv adaption has dropped on Netflix, starring Corey Mylchreest, who is straight but likes to pretend to be gay. So maybe he'll be pretending here, too.
Prologue: An elderly man walks through Ronda, an Andalusian village about an hour from Malaga., with beautiful establishing shots. He enters the empty Plaza de Toros and checks his watch, and finds a note (a picture of a clock). Suddenly a bull rushes out and gores him to death!
Scene 1: Chimneys, a stately country house in Gloucester, 1925. A party, with everyone wearing masks and being decadent. Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter) and her daughter Bundle hate the ghastly masks, but they had no choice; it was the idea of Lord and Lady Coote, to whom they are indebted. Lord Coote wants to meet George Lomax, so they can form a relationship: "His Foreign Office, my steel factories."
Lol, I can't hear the name Coote without thinking of Cornelius Coot, who founded the city of Duckburg in Disney comics.
Bundle, apparently the focus character, continues to mingle. She approaches Ronny (gay actor Nabhaan Rizwan, right) and his Boyfriend (Hughie O'Donnell), who explain that their mate Gerry hasn't gotten up before noon all week, so they're going to prank him with seven alarm clocks hidden in various places in his room.
Next, she talks to Gerry (Corey Mylchreest, top photo, butt left). He gawks with Girl of My Dreams hetero-horniness, and tells Bundle how incredibly gorgeous she is. Ok, so he won't be pretending to be gay in this one. She counters that he is incredibly gorgeous as well. They gaze at each other for about five minutes, then he asks her to dinner, and implies that he's going to propose. The gazing continues. I'm fast-forwarding past it.
Scene 2: Cut to the boyfriends giggling as they hide alarm clocks in various places in Gerry's room. Then to a card game, with Bundle and Boy of Her Dreams Gerry continuing to gaze at each other while the others chitchat. Jimmy (Edward Bluemel, butt left) joins them.
Then raucous Jazz Age dancing and more gazing.
The boyfriends are not dancing. They are engrossed with each other. I think they're a canonical couple.
Bundle drops Gerry to mingle, then goes out into the garden.
Scene 3: Morning. Establishing shot of the country house surrounded by marshland. Ronny and his Boyfriend complain of being hungover, and fill their plates. The others arrive, equally hungover.
At 11:15, the alarm clocks go off in Gerry's room. He's not turning them off, so they send the Butler to wake him. Then Bundle goes. She finds that Gerry is...dead!
Cut to the doctor (Tristan Gemmill, left), who finds a sleeping draft next to the bed. Gerry must have taken a draft to help him sleep, and since he was drunk, the combination was lethal.
"Impossible!" Bundle exclaims. "He never used sleeping drafts!" And she knows what he did before bed because....
"Then maybe it was deliberate?" the doctor suggests.
The Boyfriend: "Well, he was stressed at work. His boss, George Lomax, was always riding him."
"No way! Impossible! He was planning to propose to me."
Next up: a bumbling detective, on his first case, ineptly examines the crime scene while making jokes. Bundle thinks that it was a murder. Otherwise be lousy story.
"Wait -- there are seven clocks on the mantle. I thought you guys hid them?" The Boyfriends glance at each other in shock.
More after the break