The best Helen Hayes’s crime movies

When Miss Marple arrives at palatial Stonygates, one thing is certain. Before there's time to lather a warm scone with marmalade and place a tea cozy, murder most foul is bound to occur. Helen Hayes returns as spinster sleuth Jane Marple and Leo McKern plays the crafty inspector who teams with her in this engaging, twisty case of country-house intrigue. Someone may be slowly poisoning the aging lady of the manor (the great Bette Davis in one of her last roles). Everyone but her dutiful husband (John Mills) has a motive. The snappish housekeeper? The pompous school kid? The gun-collecting American? The uneasy psychiatrist? The embittered daughter? It could be one of them. Some of them. None of them. People are dying - but not the elderly grand dame of Stonygates!

Aging Major Palgrave, an idiosyncratic but charming mystery writer, reveals to Miss Marple that one of the guests at a luxurious Caribbean resort they're staying at is a Bluebeard-type wife murderer. Unfortunately, the Major succumbs to an apparently accidental overdose of alcohol and blood pressure medication before revealing the killer's identity. When it's discovered that the medicine belonged to another guest and the revealing photograph the Major was carrying is missing, Miss Marple realizes that the serial killer has struck again and more murders will follow.

Caddish lawyer Lee Gentry is going out with Katy Costello, but carrying on an affair with dancer Carmen Brown. When he wants to end the dalliance with Carmen, she is so distraught that she becomes suicidal. Seizing the gun from Carmen, he accidentally shoots her, and thinking she's dead, concocts a series of increasingly outlandish alibis to cover his tracks under the guidance of a ghostly apparition that is his alter ego.