M. HERCULE POIROT (Albert Finney), the hero of Sidney Lumet’s 1974 Murder on the Orient Express, is Leopold Bloom–like in silhouette, from bowler to black suit to curled mustache. The brilliantined Belgian bachelor is recruited to solve the on-board killing of a disagreeable American: the still-formidable Richard Widmark. Poirot must work fast. The Yugoslavian police are due to come aboard and make a mess of things if Hercule Poirot doesn’t figure it out.
Armed with a million-dollar springboard—what if Al Capone engineered the Lindbergh baby kidnapping?—Agatha Christie created one of her most colorful and delightful mysteries. Critiques have some validity; it’s slightly stagebound, it’s hammy, sure, and it arrives bearing a burbling Viennese-style soundtrack by Richard Rodney Bennett. “This is a train of death!” a frustrated Bernard Herrmann reportedly shouted when he first heard the winsome music, which is so angst-free that it grows a little faded by the comparative tang of one borrowed tune, “The Good Ship Lollipop.”
And yet: more than sentimentality for the cast makes this worth seeing. The challenge of enclosed (if Lalique-encrusted) surfaces and suspicious characters made it a natural for Lumet, who had done 12 Angry Men in 1957. Geoffrey Unsworth’s pre-flashed photography adds to the film’s cheer; one almost chokes up seeing Istanbul at rosy dawn landscapes and applauds the inspiration of blue lighting in the scene when death is dealt in a tiny sleeping car.
One’s respect for Lumet, already high, grows seeing him handle the fine mixed cast of film stars and theatrical greats. Sean Connery, a big Lumet fan himself, is marvelously virile as a Colonel Mustard–type (he requests Poirot’s “Word of honor as a foreigner”). Ingrid Bergman earned an Oscar for playing a cracked Swede (“I vas born backvards”). John Gielgud is the dubious butler who makes an immodest joke about spotted dick (a pudding, not a malady).
Lauren Bacall shows up as a brassy much-married actress; Anthony “I’ve Killed Before” Perkins is intoxicatingly twitchy as a high-strung secretary; and Wendy Hiller gilds the Beatrice Lillie, as it were, as a noble Russian. The celebrated 1974 film version survives beautifully as the kind of civilized entertainment in which even the victim doesn’t feel much pain. It shows with another Christie adaption, Death on the Nile, from 1978.
Murder on the Orient Express
Saturday–Tuesday @ the Stanford Theatre, Palo Alto
