Elizabeth Taylor and Kim Novak on the same set, trading insults for the cameras. Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis playing Hollywood power behind them. Angela Lansbury cast as Miss Marple, planting a seed that would eventually grow into Murder, She Wrote and a television empire. Whatever you think of The Mirror Crack’d as a mystery — and it has its clear weaknesses — the sheer spectacle of that cast makes Kino Lorber’s new 4K UHD worth the shelf space on personality alone. Drawing from Agatha Christie’s 1962 novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, itself titled after a line from Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, the film streamlines the material even further, shortening the title and reshuffling characters, names, and time periods along the way.

The story drops a Hollywood film crew into the sleepy English village of St. Mary Mead, and the collision is immediate. Aging movie star Marina Rudd (Taylor, Cleopatra) and her director husband Jason (Hudson, Giant) descend with full entourage, and rival actress Lola Brewster (Novak, Vertigo) arrives right behind them with every intention of making Marina’s life miserable. Producer Marty Fenn (Curtis, The Vikings) fans the flames. When a devoted fan drops dead at a village reception after drinking a cocktail intended for Marina, Miss Marple (Lansbury, Beauty and the Beast) goes to work — though a foot injury sidelines her physically, leaving her nephew, Inspector Craddock (Edward Fox, Never Say Never Again), to handle the legwork.

The mystery is thinner than what the companion Poirot films offered, and that’s the honest truth. But the trade-off is something none of those films can match: Hollywood legends clearly having the time of their lives being nasty to each other. Taylor and Novak both said publicly they’d never had more fun on a set. Curtis described the whole shoot as “a piece of cake.” That energy comes through in every scene they share. Goldfinger director Guy Hamilton — who would go on to direct Evil Under the Sun two years later — keeps the tone playful and the pacing brisk at 105 minutes, letting his stars do what they came to do: chew scenery with enormous, visible pleasure.

Lansbury is good as Miss Marple, though the script doesn’t give her enough room to really shine like we want her to. She spends much of the film recovering at home while Fox’s Craddock investigates, and the classically beloved Jane Marple character never commands the screen the way Peter Ustinov does in his two Poirot films. Lansbury later admitted she played it “absolutely straight” to honor Christie’s description, and while that restraint is admirable, it also means Marple gets overshadowed by the fireworks happening around her. Still, the experience clearly planted something. Within a few years, Lansbury would channel that same investigative instinct into Jessica Fletcher, and the rest is television history.

The real-life inspiration for Christie’s story — drawn from the tragic experience of actress Gene Tierney — gives the plot a genuinely dark undercurrent that the film handles with surprising sensitivity. Esteemed cinematographer Christopher Challis is behind the camera, giving the Kent countryside a warm, golden glow, and John Cameron’s score wraps it all in cozy English-village charm.

Kino Lorber’s 4K disc delivers a new HDR/Dolby Vision master from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative. The image is clean and detailed, with the English countryside looking particularly inviting in the expanded color range. The extras package is leaner than the Poirot discs — an audio commentary from Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson, TV spots, and the trailer — but the commentary provides solid historical context. Eagle-eyed viewers should keep watch for a young, uncredited, pre-James Bond Pierce Brosnan appearing briefly as an actor in the film-within-the-film.

It’s not the strongest Christie mystery on this shelf. But The Mirror Crack’d offers something the Poirot films don’t: five of Hollywood’s biggest personalities sharing a screen and clearly loving every minute of the chaos. Sometimes the cast is the show, and this cast puts on one hell of a show.