I gave this an 8 because it does keep you guessing.While investigating a spy ring for MI6, Lieutenant Colin Race is walking on a street when a young woman races out of house and starts screaming that there is a dead man in the house. Race enters to investigate.The typist is Sheila Webb. She was asked by her boss to go to this particular home and assist the woman living there. She lets herself in as instructed, and finds a dead man on the floor. There are four clocks in the room, all of which say 4:13. When the owner of the home, a Miss Pebmarsh, comes home, she says she doesn't know the man and never asked for a typist. Sheila becomes a suspect.Poirot, working with the local investigators and a friend of Colin's, comes in to investigate. He thinks one of the neighbors had a secret worth a murder, and that Miss Webb was set up.I thought this was good episode if filled with some bizarre coincidences. Poirot as played by David Suchet is perfection, and Poirot himself was very funny as he annoyed the chief inspector with what the inspector considered really dumb questions. Of course, they weren't at all.Enjoyable, set in a time when England was on the brink of war with Germany.

The Clocks is one of my favorite Poirot mysteries, so I decided to watch this adaptation - despite the mixed opinions of the viewers.Well, I liked it very much. Sheila, Colin, and of course the great detective himself are portrayed perfectly, the plot is generally faithful to the book.Though, some story changes seemed pointless to me - for example, why change Edna Brent's name?And I think that the additions on the spy subplot were completely unnecessary - they only confused everything and didn't play a big role in the solution. Casting suspicion on the Waterhouses (and making them German-born refugees), for example.So, I give the movie 8 out of 10. Minus one for the useless plot alterations, and minus one for making Inspector Hardcastle way too dull - in my opinion, too dull even for the classical "stupid policeman" of the detective stories.

A very faithful adaptation of the Clocks,with brilliant interpretations by Anna Massey as a very menacing,if sweet blind woman,Phil Daniels as a cockney cop in the Philip Jackson mold and Lesley Sharp as a snobbish and haughty secretary,is as usual wonderfully directed and written.The story is rich of hilarious characters(the Cat lady,the middle-aged couple à la George & Mildred) ,and it adds to the novel a spy subplot not too surprising and perhaps a bit old-fashioned,as if a spy melodrama from the 40s (say,The Spy in Black) would have been sewed together with a very modern and highly original whodunit.But the prologue in the Dover Castle underground HQ is so beautifully shot that it saves the too predictable solution of this minor part of the mystery (the mole discovered in the second half of the movie is so suspicious and conspicuous that even Hastings would have guessed the truth on first glance !).Nothing to complain instead with the major mystery,adapted and explained with a deft touch.(The clocks scene with the discovery of the murdered man is a joy in itself,a real masterpiece).Not the best outing of the season(the laurels go to the marvelous Tragedy) and not diabolically clever as the Mark Gatiss adaptations,but a sound,highly amusing adaptation of one of Dame Agatha's minor works

Some nice shots of Dover as Poirot investigates the case of a dead man found in a blind woman's home. A young lady enters the empty house, having been called for some temporary secretarial business, sees the legs of the corpse behind the setee, and rushes out hysterically into the arms of a handsome passing stranger who happens to be the son of the now-retired Colonel Race. Young Race acts as Poirot's sidekick in this episode and he also falls for the young secretary whose love in return is pure, though she herself has a slightly shady past.I kept thinking I'd like to know more about that shady past. This dark young woman is attractive enough but has been "working" for one of her agency's clients twice a week for some months. It develops that she is no virgo intacta. I, frankly, don't think she's pristine enough for the son of the devoted and dull and respectable Colonel Race, although it might have been entertaining if the old Colonel himself had a fling with her.There isn't too much to say about the plot, or rather plots. Christie often threw in some other subplot involving people who are particeps criminis. In this case, they don't simply divert the investigators, they confuse the viewers too. One of the plots is about the equal in importance of the other and they have nothing to do with one another. An opening scene, in which two women chase one another and are both run down and killed, hangs irrelevantly in the air until the final few minutes.I won't give away too much, I don't think, if I say that it all has to do with the approaching war with Hitler's Germany and with the inheritance of a great deal of money.