I bought this boxset of Agatha Christie thinking that Hercule Poirot is in all of the movies of Agatha Christie. I kept waiting until halfway through the movie, I gave up. But watching Jayne Ashbourne still made it worth watching. Her character here is so lovable. Anyone knows about a fan club of Jayne Ashbourne? I fell in love with her in this movie.... Anyway let me know where can I find any other details about Jayne ashbourne. I was only able to get a handful of her photos in the web and I don't think he has a facebook or twitter account...Anyone who can help me out will be much appreciated. I will be watching the second disc in the boxset tonight and I'm pretty sure I won't be disappointed.

"The names...you'll take them to the police?" The dying woman gives the priest a list of names on a slip of paper. Not long after, Mark Easterbrook (Colin Buchanan) runs down a dark alley to assist a man being beaten. The assailant disappears. As the man dies he hands the list of names to Mark. Yes, the man is the priest. Hmmm. The Pale Horse, or Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse, has a clever plot and occasionally good acting, It also has a muddied story line, a use of the three witches from Macbeth that teeters between silly and melodramatic, an unfulfilled hint of horror, an irrelevant red herring, too few suspects and a villain who is easily fingered. When Mark gives the list to the police, they naturally think that Mark himself beat the priest to death. The inspector is no Morse or Dalgliesh. Think of Elmer Fudd with a working class accent and a dumb, sly nature. It's up to Mark to prove his innocence, uncover a dastardly murder business and expose a mastermind who overacts. Mark, his girl friend Kate Mercer (Jayne Ashbourne) and Sergeant Corrigan (Andy Serkis), a young, friendly copper, eventually realize that all except one of the names are of people who have died far earlier than nature most likely intended. Eventually Mark discovers that the three eccentric old ladies who live in The Pale Horse, their ancient home that long ago had been an inn, believe themselves witches...and witches who have the power to bring death. This seems to give them great satisfaction. Then Mark learns of a bookmaker who has a sideline of accepting wagers on people's lives. With a proper introduction and evidence of financial reliability, he will, for instance, bet Mark that Mark's inconvenient former wife will be dead within two weeks. Mark will bet that she won't. In this case, Mark doesn't have an ex- wife, only Kate...and with her posing as the object of the bet, they'll expose a neat little murder-as-wager business. Ah, but what is the role of the three witches, for they must forecast the death. And if there is, indeed, murder, how can it be so well disguised as illness that no questions were raised about all those names on the list? Things become desperate for Mark when Kate soon takes to her bed, deathly ill and fading fast. The plot, indeed, is clever. However, the combination of a script which sprawls, direction which allows this, and a basic misconception of how to play up Macbeth's witches with our horrid three, gives us 100 minutes with long stretches of dullness. Colin Buchanan, a good actor, makes an engaging Mark Easterbrook. For years he has been the Pascoe in the long- running Dalziel and Pascoe series. Andy Serkis is an unexpected gem as the sergeant...young, friendly, careful around his dunderhead superior, smart enough when it counts. Overshadowing them all are two practiced, pungent scene-stealers, Leslie Phillips and Michael Byrne. Phillips' talent to play plumy-voiced rogues is unmatched. Byrne is equally adept at arrogant, condescending bullies. Whenever they appear they provide the real pleasure in this story. There have been many, many British television productions of Agatha Christie mysteries. Most have been very good. A few are a matter of taste (I've never warmed up to Tommy and Tuppence), and some simply have not worked well. The Pale Horse, I'm afraid, falls in this last category. It's not embarrassing or amateurish; it's just not very well done.

Very good actors, but one of the worst productions of Agatha Christie's works I've seen. The soundtrack tried to add to the feel of the period but only helped to make the film seem "dated". I've only recently re-discovered Agatha Christie as I had read only a couple of her books as a child in the 50's, and I've now been devouring all the works NetFlix has to offer. I've especially enjoyed Joan Hickson as Miss Marple and was looking forward to seeing one of Agatha Christie's later works having been released in 1961.I was so very disappointed in this "made for TV" movie as it was full of cliché's, miserably wrong music, incredibly bad direction and was one of those movies where I want to yell at the characters on the screen, "How can you be that stupid." I've not read the book but it appears that this could have easily have been an exceptional movie, but instead I felt that my intelligence was being assaulted more and more by the minute. The ending was a huge let-down. What a waste.

Spoilers herein.Christie isn't appreciated much these days. She wasn't great at evoking the tone of a place, nor creating fully dimensional characters. She wasn't a master of the language. Today, we seem to prefer florid language, novel insertions into situations, (cats, priests, exotic locals and professions) and `psychological' weight.But where she excelled was at understanding the elements of the mystery and devising plots that were not just clever but clever in ways that recognize the fact that it is a mystery story. Often the characters include a writer (or someone in showbusiness). And the twist would be an artifact of the telling of the story rather than the action within the story. She might have the narrator be the murderer, or have the murder victim be misidentified by the reader (and incidentally the people involved). Reading her work, at least in the middle years, is a lesson in understanding the form and bending the content to suit. It is a postmodern idea not appreciated in our postmodern times. That is especially so when films are made of her stories. The BBC usually does a `faces and places' treatment, where characters and settings are supposed to amuse us until the end when we are surprised. The ending isn't the resolution of a puzzle, a tussle between writer and reader, but rather an expected but undeserved gift.This particular production is less offensive than the BBC ones, especially the Poirot ones. It bears little resemblance to anything she wrote. But the spirit is dimly there: we have a confusing barrage of individuals and situations. The clues aren't presented fairly enough, but in a story this abbreviated they cannot be. I think there is a lesson here. This script is close in tone to the overwhelming possibilities and suspended clearances of the books. But it is a dreadful film because we expect to know where we are and where we are going. I am convinced that mixing Christie books and film is quite a challenge. I have not seen it done well, and imagine it to be a fruitful filmschool exercise.The business of the MacBeth witches was too clumsy to have come from anyone who actually knows the play.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.