The whodunnit starring Saoirse Ronan is a fun spoof but tinkers with history and never captures the unique way Agatha Christie’s play fascinated audiences in the 50s
The smell of greasepaint has always pervaded the cinema, from Les Enfants du Paradis and Le Dernier Métro to All About Eve and Theatre of Blood. It was the last of these, with its savage joke of bumping off the drama critics, that occasionally came to mind as I watched the newly released See How They Run: a spoof whodunnit based on the idea that a killer is on the loose, apparently to prevent Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap being turned into a movie.
The film is escapist fun and Mark Chappell’s script bulges with theatrical in-jokes. The title is identical to that of a 1945 farce by Philip King that contains the famous line, “Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars.” The putative Mousetrap movie is to be directed by Leo Köpernick, which I take to be a deliberate echo of Carl Zuckmayer’s play The Captain of Köpenick. Chappell’s detective is called Inspector Stoppard and at one point, in a reference to Stoppard’s own Christie parody, someone says of a corpse: “He was a real hound, Inspector.”
