Cinema: Rutherford Rides Again

Murder at the Gallop. A body lies on the floor. A little to one side, on all fours, crouches a fat old bloodhound. Its ears are pendulous, its muzzle is prominent, its bloodshot eyes stare dolefully out of enormous pouches. “Dead!” the bloodhound woofs with astonishment, and then, with a dramatic flourish of its dewlaps, the comical creature rears up on its skinny hind legs and goes waddling off on the scent of the killer.

The dear old dog, as connoisseurs of screen comedy will quickly surmise, is Britain’s Margaret Rutherford (TIME, May 24), a 71-year-old crock of charm who, pound for pound, is possibly the funniest woman alive. In Gallop, the film version of an Agatha Christie thriller called After the Funeral, Actress Rutherford once more portrays Miss Jane Marple, a dotty old dame with a weakness for cookies and a nose for blood.

This time she follows her nose to a country inn called The Gallop, where she slouches about indomitably in tweeds that could stop a bullet. “Murder most foul!” she keeps muttering to herself, and sometimes she adds: “I know my duty!” Occasionally she exceeds it. In a scene that is mercifully brief, no doubt at the insistence of the R.S.P.C.A., Actress Rutherford actually dares to ride a horse—to avoid confusion in this episode, it is helpful to remember that the heroine wears the hat. And later on she ventures to do the twist—she does it perhaps not wisely but quite well and with a massive enthusiasm that may remind some spectators of an earnest rhinoceros rubbing its backside on a tree trunk.

In the end, of course, she gets her killer. What’s more, she almost gets Robert Morley, a member of the local hunt who admires her seat and suggests that she “keep her saddle” at his house. The heroine says neigh, and at the fade, after calmly collaring a maniac with a homicidal hatpin, she prissily explains why she cannot marry him: “My dear man, I do not approve of blood sports.”