Chapter 1: The Silent Adventures

Abstract

The first section of this book deals with a lesser-known area of Agatha Christie on cinema screens—namely, the films made prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, this chapter looking at the movies produced during the silent era. Almost all of the movies explored in this section have not been commercially released or shown on television, while several are no longer known to exist, victims of archiving policies designed for short-term distribution rather than long-term preservation. This loss means that the emphasis of the second and third chapters will sometimes tend towards reconstruction as we build an understanding of how the films operated as adaptations. This chapter looks at the films The Passing of Mr Quinn (1928) and Die Abenteuer GmbH (1929), an adaptation of the novel The Secret Adversary.