Endless Night Adaptations: Book vs. Movies

This is a comparison of Agatha Christie’s Endless Night, the 1972 film adaptation, and the Agatha Christie’s Marple adaptation. And obviously, this is going to contain major spoilers for all three versions, because there is really no way to compare these adaptations properly without talking about what Michael actually does and how each version handles the ending.

Interestingly, I think the best adaptation is the Marple version, even though it is by far the least faithful to the book. The 1972 film follows Christie’s story much more closely, but unfortunately it also manages to be almost as slow and boring as some of the weaker parts of the novel. Christie herself apparently did not like the film, and having watched it, I can see why.

The 1972 adaptation keeps the basic structure of Endless Night largely intact. Michael is still the young man drifting through life who meets the wealthy Ellie, marries her, and builds his dream house on Gipsy’s Acre. The house is still supposed to be strikingly modern, which is important because it represents this fantasy Michael has created for himself. It is not simply somewhere to live. It is the physical version of the life he thinks he wants.

One strange change, though, is Michael’s taste in art. In the book, he likes modern art and does not particularly care for classical art. That fits perfectly with his fascination with the house and with the architect who designs it. In the 1972 film, Michael instead likes classical art, which creates a strange contrast with this extremely modern house he is supposedly obsessed with building. It is a small change, but it makes his character slightly less coherent.

The film also expands some scenes considerably. Michael’s meeting with the architect becomes a much longer conversation, and I actually thought that worked fairly well because it allows the film to establish Michael’s background and ambitions without simply dumping exposition on the audience. At the same time, the entire encounter feels weirdly homoerotic. That becomes part of a much larger pattern because this film seems absolutely determined to put sexual content wherever it possibly can.

There are some genuinely bizarre sexual scenes, particularly involving Greta, and some of them have an almost fetishistic quality that feels completely unnecessary. There is also a scene after Michael quits his chauffeur job where another man essentially asks him about finding prostitutes. None of this really contributes anything to the story. It mostly feels like the filmmakers remembered that it was the 1970s and decided that an Agatha Christie adaptation therefore needed considerably more sex.

The film also makes a strange change to Michael and Ellie’s married life by having them own an antique shop. Michael is the one who actually goes to work there, while Ellie does not, and I do not remember anything equivalent to this in the book. It is an odd addition because one of the defining things about Michael is that he has spent his life drifting from one thing to another without really settling anywhere. Once he has married an extremely wealthy woman, giving him a business that he dutifully goes to work at feels almost contradictory to the fantasy he has supposedly been pursuing. He has finally achieved this life in which he never needs to work again, and the film promptly sends him to work.

And that is probably my biggest problem with the 1972 adaptation. The middle is boring. It follows the book reasonably well, but being faithful to the events of a novel does not automatically make something a good adaptation. A film still has to work as a film.

Where the 1972 version really surprised me, though, was the ending.

Michael narrates the story throughout the film, and at the end the adaptation does something genuinely clever with that narration. After Ellie dies and Michael kills Greta, his mental state completely fractures. He begins seeing people in the house, and the film leans much more heavily into the breakdown of his perception of reality. Eventually we discover that the Michael who has been telling us this story is actually in an institution after everything that happened.

That completely changes the function of his narration.

What we have been watching is effectively Michael writing or constructing his confession from inside an asylum. When he is questioned about what really happened, there is suddenly an ambiguity to everything we have just seen. Michael has told us this story, but Michael is also deeply unreliable. He seems almost to be considering the possibility that what he has written is simply one version of events.

I loved that.

It takes something that already works extremely well in Christie’s novel, the unreliable first person narrator, and finds a specifically cinematic way of playing with it. The film does not merely reproduce the book’s ending. It uses Michael’s fractured mental state to make us question the story we have just watched. For me, that is easily the strongest part of the entire adaptation.

Then there is the Marple version, which does something completely different.

Technically, Miss Marple has absolutely no business being in Endless Night. She is not in the novel at all. What I really like, though, is that adding her does not turn Michael’s story into a conventional Miss Marple mystery. Michael is still very much the central character, and the adaptation continues to follow his life rather than shifting the focus onto Miss Marple investigating him.

Instead, she simply keeps bumping into him.

This version changes the period as well. The novel itself is surprisingly vague about exactly when the story takes place. I naturally pictured it as contemporary to when Christie wrote it, and the 1972 film does exactly that. The Marple adaptation instead moves the story back to the 1930s.

Aesthetically, I think that works beautifully.

They still keep the idea of Michael wanting a radically modern house, but here the house looks a lot better, especially on the inside. It is sleek, geometric and glamorous while still looking like somewhere a person might genuinely want to live. I would absolutely live in that house. The 1972 house, by comparison, looks like someone tried to cram every futuristic gadget they could think of into one building, including an indoor swimming pool that barely seems to serve any purpose.

The village setting also gives the adaptation a very natural way of putting Miss Marple into Michael’s story without making her the centre of it. She meets Michael because she happens to be there, and after that they keep crossing paths at different points in his life. She is present for several significant events simply because they repeatedly find themselves in the same place. Eventually Michael knows her well enough that her continuing presence around him does not feel particularly strange.

That is a surprisingly elegant solution to the problem of inserting a famous detective into a story that originally did not have one. The adaptation does not need to rebuild the plot around Miss Marple. Michael remains the protagonist, while Miss Marple becomes someone on the periphery of his life who gradually sees enough pieces of it to understand what is really happening.

The adaptation also makes a major change to the architect, and this may actually be my favourite alteration.

Instead of Michael simply admiring an architect’s work and eventually meeting him, the architect is someone Michael has known since they were young. More importantly, the boy Michael killed when he was younger was the architect’s brother.

In the original story, Michael steals a watch from a boy and kills him. The Marple version expands that incident into something that becomes directly connected to the present day. Michael pretends that he tried to save the young man, and the surviving brother believes that Michael attempted to rescue him. That creates a bond between them. Eventually, that same man becomes the architect who designs Michael’s dream house.

Which means Michael has manipulated him for years.

That feels completely right for Michael.

Instead of the architect entering his life almost by chance, the adaptation makes him another person Michael has deceived and used. The house itself consequently becomes part of that deception. Michael gets his dream home partly because a man believes he once tried to save his brother, when Michael was actually the person who killed him.

And the adaptation pays this off beautifully at the end.

After Ellie and Greta are dead, the architect finds his brother’s watch in Michael’s house. Suddenly he understands why Michael had it. Michael was never trying to save his brother. He killed him.

It is a small object, but because the adaptation has built this relationship across the story, the watch becomes physical proof of who Michael has always been.

Miss Marple also confronts Michael, which naturally changes the ending because there is now someone outside Michael’s immediate circle who has been watching pieces of his life fall into place. Michael still experiences his psychological collapse, although I do not think the Marple version portrays his fractured mind quite as powerfully as the 1972 film does. That is the one area where the earlier adaptation is clearly stronger.

But overall, I think the Marple adaptation works best.

And it is interesting that it works precisely because it is willing to change the source material.

The 1972 film is much more faithful to the events of Christie’s novel, yet much of it feels slow and strangely lifeless. It adds scenes without necessarily adding meaning, and some of its attempts to make the story more adult mostly result in bizarre sexual material that feels completely disconnected from what makes Endless Night interesting.

The Marple adaptation changes the period, adds Miss Marple, rewrites Michael’s relationship with the architect, changes the circumstances surrounding his first murder, and restructures the ending. On paper, that sounds like exactly the kind of adaptation I should complain about.

But almost every major change has a purpose.

The architect becomes more emotionally connected to Michael. The first murder becomes relevant to the present story. Miss Marple is woven into Michael’s life without taking the story away from him. Even the modern house preserves the essential idea behind Christie’s original house while making it visually fit this new version of the story.

Most importantly, the adaptation understands Michael.

That is why I think its changes work. Michael is a manipulator. He uses people, creates versions of himself for them, and allows them to believe whatever will give him what he wants. Having him manipulate the architect through the death of the architect’s own brother is horrifying, but it is also completely believable for this character.

So if you are only going to watch one adaptation of Endless Night, I would actually recommend the Marple version. It is the least faithful adaptation in terms of literal events, but I think it is the most faithful to the spirit of the story.

I would still give the 1972 film a watch, particularly if you already know the book. Most of it did not work particularly well for me, but its final use of Michael as an unreliable narrator is genuinely clever. In fact, I wish the rest of the film had been as inventive as its ending.

And I do think both versions are worth experiencing if you like Endless Night. Knowing the twist does not make the adaptations pointless because prose and film tell stories in completely different ways. The novel traps us inside Michael’s version of himself. The 1972 film takes that narration and makes it increasingly fractured and uncertain. The Marple adaptation still centres Michael, but places Miss Marple quietly at the edges of his life, where she gradually sees enough to recognise the person underneath the version of himself he shows everyone else.

Oddly enough, then, the adaptation that changes Christie’s story the most is the one that seems to understand it best.