one of my absolute favorites!

The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely - in its own surreal way

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Wish Kitchen had not had the mustache. Wish Sarah Miles wasn't in it. I agree with the previous comment that she is over-rated and has no appeal at all. Even her voice, perhaps mostly her voice, is so unattractive that when she's speaking I turn off the sound. She is the fly in the ointment of any film she has been in, including Poirot. Otherwise this is a well-paced and beautifully photographed film. The settings are historically accurate and well thought out and researched. I enjoyed seeing the dignified offices, were they really so beautiful? Was this very English film successful in the USA? American films tend to move much faster, with warnings of 'flashing images'. No problem with that in this film, it maintains a steady slow pace which renders it plausible and life-like. David Thewliss is a wonderful contrast to Kitchen. His hangdog expressions provide a light touch, a technique Shakespeare uses to great effect. A superb film which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I notice that the two comments with an American address have found difficulty appreciating the "Englishness" of the portrayals and general directorial approach. One complains of the missed opportunity to delve into the psychological thriller possibilities of the plot. Surely the point is that it is not meant to be a thriller at all and that this is all the better for it. As for Sarah Miles' acting, few play neurotic and repressed better than her. This is mainly why the death so strongly elicits sympathy in the watcher however morally unacceptable. I felt the production was perfectly pitched, the acting uniformly on target and Michael Kitchen, outstanding, doing what he does best, stiff upper lip, repressed emotion, English social manners etc.

The revival of interest in Mike Hodges prompts another look at this 1994 mini-series, directed while he was in the feature-film wilderness. Like nearly all he touches, it is about desperate violence. However this is no 'Get Carter' but a well-mannered, low-key account of the sort of cause celebre Orwell lamented in 'Decline of the English Murder' as a casualty of the Second World War. Major Armstrong's murder trial gripped Britain. The Attorney General himself conducted the prosecution, and the famous 'Daily Express' editor RD Blumenfeld narrowly escaped imprisonment for contempt when he published a photograph of the defendant's eyes.Herbert Rowse Armstrong ('Major' was a temporary Great War rank, snobbishly retained) was a pillar of the remote community of Hay-on-Wye, a market town on the England-Wales border. He was a churchwarden, master of the local Freemasons lodge, a Cambridge law graduate, the district's leading solicitor and clerk to three magistrates' courts. In April 1922 he was convicted of poisoning his wife and hung: the only British solicitor ever to suffer such ignominy.During war service Armstrong-- a doting but henpecked husband of a neurasthenic wife and a father of three-- had met a charming widow, named in the film but not when she was a witness. Armstrong had also contracted syphilis in France, though not from her. Returning to Hay, he had developed a strong resentment of Oswald Martin, a younger rival in the law who had set up literally opposite Armstrong's somewhat rundown premises over a shop. The prosecution alleged that Armstrong poisoned both his wife, for her money, and Martin for harassing him over the payment of monies owed to a client.The film does not adjudicate on Armstrong's motives or his guilt; it allows Michael Kitchen, in a bravura display of restraint, to plead his cause or incriminate himself as the viewer judges. Kitchen had always been a little too intense for any given role, but here he achieves the consummate screen actor's gift of conveying much with very little: a raised eyebrow, a twitch, pursed lips, the slight contortion of a frail frame. (Armstrong weighed only seven stone and was 5 feet 5 tall.) His buttoned-up demeanour is matched by a voice which protests mildly or pleads gently: a sinister mockery when asking after a victim's health, or merely the politesse of a gentleman attorney?Hay is a fading backwater, admirably designed by Voytek in shades of brown and black, lightened by Armstrong's escape to the hills with his lady love or interludes of uncertain happiness at home with his three children. In the narrow streets neighbours peer, gossip and nurse growing suspicions. The pace is relaxed, the expected moment when Armstrong is either caught in the act or proved innocent never arrives, and the four hours' traffic ends on a note of irresolution which may leave some feeling cheated.It is pleasant to record that one detail the audience might suspect was a bit of scriptwriter's trimming was true: Armstrong really was arrested on New Year's Eve, and had to see 1922 in from a cell.Other, more material facts are also largely respected. Emphasis in Michael Chaplin's screenplay is on the events, not on the trial at Hereford Assizes. As Curtis Bennett (Denys Hawthorne), the defending counsel, argued, Armstrong's motives for the alleged crimes were thin indeed. He was said to have murdered his wife for her money and to be free to remarry; yet he was solvent, her legacy to him lay untouched for a year till he had to draw on it for his lawyers' bills, and he never proposed to his inamorata. And would he have fed Martin a poisoned scone ("excuse fingers") just because of a business dispute? Against that, why did the Major divide the arsenic he claimed he bought to kill weeds (hence the film's title) into small packets, and why was he still carrying one around when he was arrested, instead of leaving it safely locked up at home? The high point of the trial came when Sir Charles Darling (Ralph Nossek), one of the most famous judges of the day, effectively took over the prosecution and grilled Armstrong, who briefly lost his iron composure.The jury took three minutes to decide that he was a wife murderer. The Major protested his innocence to the end. The Martin charge lay on the file; Martin died only two years later, depressed and showing signs of continuing damage from poison. But in 1988 a solicitor who lived in Armstrong's old home wrote a book exonerating him and seeking to show how Mrs Armstrong might have committed suicide.Connoisseurs of 'Inspector Morse' will have no trouble identifying the composer whose long chords and piano plinks punctuate 'Dandelion Dead'. Among supporting performances, Chloe Tucker is outstanding as the Major's owlishly bespectacled and gawky eldest daughter Eleanor, oscillating between love and suspicion. But it is Kitchen's film. He found the right register for the first time, enabling him to rise from the showiness and petulance of his young-man performances towards the calm authority of 'Foyle's War'. He may be the next Jason or Thaw.

I watched this film knowing nothing about the case, or Major Armstrong before, and found it engaging, and very well acted - but still a bit cold and distant.The story follows Major Armstrong, a lawyer with a shrewish wife who plots to murder her and a business rival with arsenic. Michael Kitchen does excellent work as Armstrong, playing him as extremely conniving, but also horribly pathetic and weak. David Thewlis does a great turn as well as terminally shy fellow lawyer Oswald Martin, whom Armstrong attempts to murder because of a real estate deal gone south.These performances are worth watching "Dandelion Dead" alone, as well as the interesting true-life story, but director Hodges fails to really delve into the psychological thriller aspects of the material, which seem so apparent, so the whole experience fails to really connect with the viewer emotionally.