Episode 17 of Season 1 of the CBS series Danger bears the title Appointment with Death but although many internet resources including IMDb state that this is an adaptation of Agatha Christie's work,[1] detailed information about this production is scarce and there is some doubt whether this is the case or whether this is a different story with the same title.[2] It is being included here for completeness.
Danger was an anthology series comprising 30 minute episodes of stand-alone psychological and murder dramas. The series had already produced a previous adaptation of Agatha Christie (see Witness for the Prosecution (Danger S1 Ep 7)). However it is hard to see how the plot points of Christie's novel Appointment with Death could be fitted within a 30 minute short film. If this Danger episode featured Poirot as in the original novel, this could hardly have failed to attract US media interest or reviews, yet the newspapers of this period are strangely silent beyond a bare listing of the programme. It is true that Christie wrote a stageplay adaptation in 1945 in which she eliminated Poirot and changed the nature of the crime, and it is slightly more plausible that this would be the basis for the adaptation, but even this stageplay would typically run for much longer and it is hard to see how the storyline could be compressed within 30 minutes.
The episode was broadcast on 16 Jan 1951 and is not known to have survived.
Cast[]
- Dean Harens
- Jerome Thor
References[]
- ↑ See for example, IMDb's page here.
- ↑ Mark Aldridge, Agatha Christie on Screen (London: Palgave MacMillan, 2016), footnote 5 on page 65, ebook edition.