Big Gun, Low Aim

Murder Most Foul. "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up . . ." begins Margaret Rutherford, auditioning for a provincial repertory company with a daffy, definitive recitation of Robert Service's Yukon ballad, The Shooting of Dan McGrew. She has no sooner finished than an actor drops dead at her feet. Though the plot has it that the poor chap was done in by poison, it appears more likely that he died of envy, for an act like Rutherford's is hard to follow.

As the fourth film based on the ad ventures of Agatha Christie's snooper-sleuth Miss Marple, Murder casts a mere shadow of the series' former stealth, and Actress Rutherford has to flesh out the fun singlehanded. After working her bit of mischief as member of a hung jury, she sallies forth to pursue her hunch that a wilted rose and a faded theater program offer irrefutable evidence that a homicide has a ham in it. While the police fumble, she marshals vast jowls behind a mouth jutted into a small downturned crescent of incontestable certainty, or inhales all the air in her immediate vicinity, then slowly lets it go again, sifting for clues the way a whale sifts plankton. At last, face to face with a remorseless killer, she plucks a dainty pistol from her gown and remarks: "I should warn you, I won the ladies' small-arms championship." Rutherford fans are aware by now that every Murder will out more or less the same way, but it does seem a pity to assign so much small-bore comedy to one of moviedom's Big Berthas.

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