Oxford opera

Endeavour 2012 U.K. PBS Masterpiece Mystery! (103 minutes) written and devised by Russell Lewis; directed by Colm McCarthy; based on characters created by Colin Dexter.

‘Bad’ makes noise and stinks, but less often than not gives rise to the evil necessary to commit murder most foul.

In this story, sexual jealousy undoes a tidy blackmail set-up involving underage schoolgirls and bent cops, politicians, and government officials in mid-1960s Oxford.

Oxford City police bring in out-of-town help to find a missing teenage girl who turns up naked and dead in the woods. Police set about rounding up the usual clichés: a naïve young ‘redhead well-developed for her age’ fell in with the wrong crowd and got into trouble, and boys will be boys—especially old boys who should know better. It’s a tragedy, but life goes on.

That is, for all but one out-of-town rookie police constable brought to Oxford for his ‘knowledge of the local terrain’ as a former Greats candidate: Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans).

Young Morse wonders what the devil a schoolgirl was doing with expensive first edition hardback poetry volumes place-marked with a series of Saturday crosswords clipped from a local paper. In each instance, only the first across and the last down of each grid is filled in; the acrosses are place names in Oxford, the downs are numbers.

Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans) investigates the victim's reading

A loner who carries his resignation letter ready in his breast pocket, Morse has a thing for opera and crosswords and knows English Romantic poetry. His classical training and knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and a single-mindedness that makes him all but impervious to intimidation become crucial to cracking what turns out to have been ‘an almost perfect crime.’

This movie is a prequel to the Inspector Morse series starring John Thaw in the title role that Masterpiece Mystery! ran from 1987-2000. It is rich with references to the long-running series, not to mention Morse’s red Jaguar, Morse creator Colin Dexter behind The Times at an outdoor table at an Oxford pub, and Thaw’s daughter Abigail Thaw in a cameo as an Oxford newspaper editor. Thaw himself momentarily looks back from the rearview mirror at Evans’ Morse behind the wheel of a police car.

But the best thing about this prequel is that it and its star move comfortably in their own clothes in a well-cast, well-made, well-spun whodunit. In this spirit, the film calls itself by Morse’s first name, Endeavour, which fans of the earlier series know that Thaw’s Morse never used (and mentioned once only in an unguarded moment).

Evans might not be the first actor one would have cast for this role. He is ideal in it though, because he clearly understands the character and it is a pleasure to watch this young actor begin to become the man the middle-aged Thaw made flesh. (A series of four more episodes has been made but not yet released.)

'Good cop' Detective Inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam), Morse's mentor. 

Evans is supported in this role, and as a rookie cop, by Roger Allam’s excellent Detective Inspector Fred Thursday, a ‘good cop’ who represents everything that Morse likes about police work, and Danny Webb’s equally good Detective Inspector Arthur Lott, a ‘bad cop’ who stands for everything Morse dislikes about the police and which accounts for his letter of resignation.

Subsidiary to these is the cheerfully facetious and pedantic coroner (Is there any other kind?), Dr. Max DeBryn (James Bradshaw), who tells a squeamish Morse at his first crime scene, ‘You won’t make much of a detective if you’re not prepared to look death in the eye.’

Morse is not impressed by academics such as his former fellow student Alexander Reece (Christopher Brandon) nor Dr. Rowan Stromming (Richard Lintern), a Classics tutor. He is impressed the less so when he discovers the two had a £5 bet regarding Stromming’s Pygmalion-like ‘tuition’ of Mary Tremlett (Rachel Heaton), their dear-in-the-headlamps who ends up dead in the woods.

Mary Tremlett (Rachel Heaton), an Oxonian 'dear-in-the-headlamps.'

Shortly thereafter, Miles Percival (Harry Kershaw), Mary Tremlett’s former beau and one of Stromming’s undergraduates, apparently shoots himself on the riverbank—Morse’s first crime scene.

Morse subsequently discovers that Mary and some of her school friends attended ‘parties’ for influential older men, including Sir Richard Lovell (Patrick Malahide), minister for Overseas Affairs and constituency Member of Parliament for Oxford North. One of Mary’s friends is Jenny Crisp (Daisy Head), daughter of Detective Chief Inspector Crisp (Terence Harvey), who commands the city police force.

Teddy Samuels (Charlie Creed-Miles), a spiv Jaguar dealer with an edge, arranges these fêtes. They take place in a mothballed great house formerly owned by the Earls of Oxford, though since under the sketchy supervision of the Treasury Department. The house appears to fall within the purview of a shadowy ‘Special Branch’ chap who owns only to the name ‘Dempsey’ (John Light).

The murdered girl has an adoring older widower father Stan Tremlett (Ian Gelder) and a resentful older sister, Sharon Veelie (Emma Stansfield), married but separated from her husband, who has a connection with Samuels.

And there is the glamorous opera singer Rosalind Calloway (Flora Montgomery), now Stromming, the ‘beautiful woman with diamond earrings,’ who retired as a performing artist when she married Professor Stromming. It turns out that Morse’s love of opera began with first hearing Calloway sing Madame Butterfly; he can’t believe that his work has given him the chance to meet his lifelong ‘heroine.’ 

A star-struck Morse and his heroine, opera singer Rosalind Calloway (Flora Montgomery).

Morse’s challenge is to figure out how all these moving parts make this peculiar town clock tick. Our entertainment is to spend an hour and a half with this engaging fellow as he goes about doing this.

Apart from the recurring aria, Un bel di, from Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (sung by Janis Kelly), Barrington Pheloung composed and conducted the theme and incidental music, as he did in the Inspector Morse series.

After we see Thaw’s Morse look back at Evans’ Morse from the car rearview mirror at the end, we hear Pheloung’s well known series motif based on the Morse code for M-O-R-S-E: Endeavour Morse has become Morse.

Shaun Evans, left, and John Thaw, right, as Masterpiece Mystery!'s Morse.