Does anyone think that a murderer, FROM ACROSS A TABLE, , would shoot the victim under the chin rather than in the heart our between the eyes? The gun slid across the table, the judge wanting to leave the impression that there was a mystery killer...doesn't work for me.
They bid me take my place among them In the halls of Valhalla, where the brave may live forever.
That the gun somehow flew out of his hand like that, I have a problem with.
That he was shot under the chin and the gun is on the other side of the table, I don't have a problem with. All the police would infer from that is that the killer placed the gun there afterward. Makes sense to me. Killer sticks the gun under Wargrave's chin and shoots him. Killer at some point puts the gun on the table. All that matters from the mystery point of view is that the gun is supposedly too far away from Wargrave for Wargrave to have killed himself and put it there. (Though we know that's not true. That's why the big mistake I think they did make in this scene was not using the elastic band trick from the book which is how Wargrave got the gun far from himself after he shot himself.)
In the book the killer set up a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption to ensure that the gun flew away after he shot himself. The producers probably thought that would look ridiculous on screen. ( Christie got the gimmick from the Sherlock Holmes THOR BRIDGE story, where it was done a bit more plausibly.)
sharewell wouldn't there really be signs of a struggle if the killer approached the Judge and tried to put the gun under his chin?....but then again, it is television.
They bid me take my place among them In the halls of Valhalla, where the brave may live forever.
If we're talking about the angle of the shot from acroas the table, i would just remind y'all that forensics was not really a thing yet. We think like the people on CSI, but those departments didn't exist back then.
shareHistorical note: Forensics and numerous other investigative techniques were invented by Vidocq, a 19th century French ex-criminal who helped the Paris police in return for a pardon. Vidocq is supposed to be the model for numerous fictional detectives: Javart in LES MISERABLES, Porfiry in CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Vautrin in Balzac's novels, Dupin in Poe's stories, Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and Christie's Poirot. (see Wikipedia:Vidocq)
Of course, local British police may not have adopted all of Vidocq's suggestions.
A bigger problem is Armstrong. In the book, Vera and Philip drag his body out of the reach of the tides, which is how the police know that someone else was alive on the island after Armstrong was killed. Since they don't do that in this adaptation, the police could easily conclude that Armstrong was Mr. Owen.
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