Like many screen adaptations of Christie novels, THE MIRROR CRACK'D features an all-star cast--and in this case the casting would seem inspired: Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple, Rock Hudson as a film producer, Elizabeth Taylor as his movie-star wife, Kim Novack as a rival screen queen, and Tony Curtis as Novak's lover and the producer of the film they are all making. But director Guy Hamilton is more interested in having his cast offer star turns than in actually serving the story, and the result is a strangely uneven, extremely plodding film that only comes to life when Taylor and Novak square off in the series of hilariously written and performed cat-fights that run throughout the movie.<br /><br />Part of the problem lies in the source material. THE MIRROR CRACK'D is one of Christie's lesser novels, written in a very sparse style and lacking Christie's usual knock-out solution in its story of a fan who drops dead of poisoning at a film star's reception. In order to flesh out the tale, the script piles extraneous scene upon extraneous scene--with the Taylor-Novak scenes a case in point: enjoyable as they are, they actually have little to do with the story and so tend to slow the film down. To make matters worse, the performances are extremely casual at best. Taylor and Novak are extremely enjoyable in their scenes together--but elsewhere they are merely adequate. Hudson and Curtis are flat. And Angela Lansbury, a normally brilliant actress, has one of her rare failures with the role of Jane Marple.<br /><br />At most, this film is for viewers who want to be in on the last major cinematic gasps of Taylor, Novak, Hudson, and Curtis--and those who derive a certain joy from evaluating the level of decay seen here in the aging cast. Regretfully, this is particularly true of Taylor, who is... shall we say... extremely ample. And most will enjoy seeing Taylor and Novak flog each other with nasty one-liners delivered with considerable flair. But cat-fight scenes aside, THE MIRROR CRACK'D is just one very mild meow.<br /><br />Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer