SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

ctyankee1 I always like Agatha Christie Miss Marple especially with Joan Hickson. Then things that went on in this episode woke me up. Supposedly this hotel was a high class hotel with rich people. The suspense surrounds different things that happen in the hotel.There are competing characters, Bess, Elvira, Michael Gorman, Ladislaus Malinowski and more. No Inspector Slack.A woman that is highly respected is really the head of a group of thieves. She is having an affair with a man who is also going to marry her daughter.What I find offensive is a man who sleeps around is a womanizer and questioned by police is wearing Christian Cross. I am a Christian and this is how they portrayed this man in this episode. That is the only time you see the Cross at all. I find the more I re-watch these videos the more I see they offend me. I don't know if Christie put these in her stories I never read her books. Many women played Miss Marple and they played in episodes by the same name but the episodes are similar but not the same. Example Geraldine McEwan played Miss Marple in "The Body in the Library " which is totally different which has lesbians kissing which is disgusting but the one Joan Hickson was in had nothing like that.So I think people are re-writing Christie's stories and putting their own morals in videos in different years. At the end Miss Marple praises a certain criminal as "remarkable"I support the law. I don't think criminals that do many bad things then confess to something they did not do to help someone else is "remarkable". I am very dissappointed in the way things turned out.

Iain-215 'Bertrams' has never been one of my favourite Miss Marple books. It's slow and unlikely and not much really happens. The new ITV McEwen version tries to remedy this by packing in lots of additional stuff and fails miserably. In my opinion, the BBC Hickson version does the reverse and improves on the original material. I think it's one of the best looking of the Hickson adaptations with great attention to detail and an effective musical score. It's very restrained but it works by sharpening the original characters. There are some lovely performances from Joan Greenwood, James Cossins and Preston Lockwood. Helena Michell is OK as a rather chilly Elvira but I can't heap enough praise on the terrific Caroline Blakiston who is superb as the crucially important character of Bess Sedgwick. Yes, her performance is over the top but then Bess as a character is over the top, lively and dynamic - a true adventuress and Blakiston captures this perfectly.Joan Hickson is clever and astute once more as Miss Marple though George Baker is a trifle dull as Davy and I began to get a bit annoyed with his Gilbert & Sullivan quotes. Overall, a really good entry in this series and much better than McEwen.

sherryminou07 I've been an Anglophile since I was a kid, but only recently had the patience to read Agatha Christie's books (so much detail!!). Bertram's Hotel became one of my favorite because Miss Marple goes to the big city and visits places she knew as a child. We get a bit of Little Jane and what she enjoyed.The British have always been great at adapting books to film. This Bertram's is an excellent example. It maintains the integrity of a book while condensing it into a short span.Bertram's Hotel is all that and more. The plot, characters and environment are beautifully done and wonderful to watch. An aging Joan Hickson (one of her later Marples) appropriately plays the aging Miss Marple. A friend replies "She must be 100 years old," or something to that effect.The mystery is intriguing and I love seeing one of my favorite sleuths still able to see everything for what it really is, while fooling everyone with her elderly appearance. I love the actress who plays Bess Sedgwick. She hits the mark as Christie wrote her and she's fun to watch. I actually cared a great deal about her although some things about her character are not so hot. That pretty much goes for all the characters with one exception. Vadislaus Marinovsky is appropriately arrogant, still in keeping with the book.This episode of the Miss Marple series with Joan Hickson is absolutely wonderful. I bought the DVD set and watch it often.ONE WORD OF WARNING: If you're a newbie, do NOT mistake the two series. The new Marple series with Geraldine McEwan is terrible!!

bob the moo Miss Marple accepts a stay at an expensive and classy hotel courtesy of her nephew Raymond and arrives to find that Bertram's is as beautiful and preserved as people say. As she settles in she meets the various other guests and finds them to be quite interesting characters; a forgetful Colonel, an international traveller, a Lady and a doorman who seems to have a connection to one of the guests in the past. All the talk is of a series of robberies happening around the area but the strange disappearance of the Colonel distracts from this. Concerned by the circumstances of his vanishing, Mrs Marple places a call to Chief Inspector Davy to take a look into it.Having recently watched a lot of Columbo, Perry Mason and "mystery" series like that, the return to watching the BBC version of Miss Marple has left me a little culture shocked but still enjoying it. Here we have almost an hour going by before the first bit of the mystery happens but this isn't a real problem because we have the background of robberies and the development of the various characters in the hotel. For some this will seem quite dull but in this film I actually quite enjoyed it. The mystery element is quite well done despite the limitations of the material because, it must be said, that if you boil the story down to the core it really isn't that good and the conclusion didn't really inspire me when it finally came down to it. I've struggled with some miss Marple films to get past the slow pace but here the detail (the sets, the people and the story) helped fill the silent, slow patience with something to engage me. It could have been better of course, with a bit more complexity and an ending that works rather than just happens but I still enjoyed it.The performances help to do this as much as Hyem's writing. Hickson is very much Miss Marple; perhaps not as flamboyant as some would like but to me she fits the humourless, proper, English spinster really well. She is matched here by George Baker, who gives a great performance as the relaxed and slightly unprofessional CI. The support cast are not quite as memorable but generally are pretty good with the likes of Blakiston, Michell, Cossins and McGrath. The film looks good, with plenty of nice period detail, while McMurray directs with a patience and steady camera that suits the material and the performances.Overall a gradual film whose strength is strangely not the murder mystery. A bit slow for some viewers but had sufficient layers to it to be interesting and enjoyable.