Murder on the Orient Express
Sidney Lumet (1974)
The stellar cast sharing a fateful means of transport gives it a connection with some of the disaster movies of the time. The film also turned out to be the prototype of all the Agatha Christie screen adaptations – for cinema and television – in which the antiquity of the story and the opulent, comfortable settings (the 1930s in this case) are integral to the audience’s enjoyment. Sidney Lumet’s assembling of the star passengers on the Orient Express is leisurely entertaining, leading up to the illustrious train’s grand departure from the station in Istanbul – a sequence which the sheen of Geoffrey Unsworth’s lighting and the jolly verve of Richard Rodney Bennett’s famous score help make climactic. The denouement – Hercule Poirot regaling us with the details of who murdered the egregious American tycoon in his sleeping compartment during the journey, and how – is leisurely too. And too leisurely: it goes on so long that the movie – at what should be the climax – grinds to a halt. The train has done this at an earlier stage: it’s stuck in a snow drift in the Balkans, for as long as Poirot needs to conduct his enquiries and solve the crime. In between, there’s the build-up to the murder and the interrogation by Poirot of his twelve fellow passengers, in ones and twos. I’d not watched Murder on the Orient Express all the way through since I saw it at the Odeon in York on (I seem to remember) the day before my twentieth birthday in 1975. It’s very pleasant and variously enjoyable but Lumet’s mishandling of the last part is a serious error from which the film can’t recover. It leaves you feeling a little deflated – and puzzled. It’s not only that the detailed preparations have led you to expect something more. You can’t understand why such an amusingly ingenious explanation of the crime seems lame.
Poirot (Albert Finney) offers his friend Bianchi (Martin Balsam), a director of the company that owns the line, alternative accounts of who killed Mr Ratchett (Richard Widmark), who turns out to be a gangster and the prime mover in the kidnap and murder, a few years before, of an American child, Daisy Armstrong, the daughter of a military hero and his beautiful wife. There’s a taut, dark prologue to the film, which summarises the events surrounding Daisy’s death (a set-up which is obviously borrowed from the Lindbergh baby case), through a montage of photographs, newspaper headlines etc. One theory is that the killer was a fellow Mafioso, who got onto the stopped train, stabbed Ratchett twelve times, and got off again, without anyone noticing. The other theory is that each of the people on board the Orient Express – except for Poirot, Bianchi and a Greek doctor (George Coulouris) – had a personal connection with the Armstrong family; and that each of them administered one of the stab wounds in revenge for the murder of Daisy. Because Ratchett got what he deserved and Bianchi prefers to avoid scandal, he opts for the former theory as an explanation for the police when the train, now on the move again, reaches its next stop. All the travellers and the audience know better of course, and the film’s conclusion should be triumphantly witty: it’s as if Agatha Christie was sending up herself and the whodunnit with this particular plot. It’s de rigueur in her stories that every character, other than those we know from earlier ones, is viewed as a potential culprit. In Murder on the Orient Express, everyone acts suspiciously and everyone is guilty.
There are other little amusements in the film, seen from this distance in time anyway. The villainous Mr Ratchett in this 1974 movie was followed a year later by the appalling Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: the pronunciation of the nurse’s name makes it sound like ‘rat shit’ and, even with the variety of accents in Murder on the Orient Express, the same thing happens here. Bianchi is baffled by how busy the train is for the time of year (he knows by the end) and Poirot, on his first night, is forced to share a compartment with Ratchett’s secretary McQueen, who is played by Anthony Perkins. The great solver of harmless murders spends the night with Norman Bates. Albert Finney played Poirot only this once. While it’s true there was no reason to think at the time the film would be the forerunner of other lavish big-screen versions of Agatha Christie stories featuring Poirot, I liked the fact that Finney evidently approached this as a one-off. With the worked mannerisms, the elaborate Belgian accent and the heavy make-up, his performance is far from effortless, but its wit and oddness are winning – and, in retrospect, refreshing, compared with Peter Ustinov’s easy, shallow intellectuality in Death on the Nile and so on (let alone David Suchet’s tedious television Poirot).
Finney’s appealing ringmaster quality holds the thing together but the film is largely about the people playing the passengers. There’s not much interesting interaction between them but Lumet, working from a screenplay by Paul Dehn, is evidently thrilled working with this cast, his enthusiasm is often infectious and he orchestrates the one-set action well until the closing stages. When Poirot interviews the passengers in turn, they start to come across rather like contestants for a prize, and you decide who you think is best. It was a bit much that Ingrid Bergman won her third Oscar (her first as Best Supporting Actress) for her work in here but she is very, theatrically funny as a spinsterish Swedish missionary. Bergman shares the palm with John Gielgud, as Ratchett’s caustic valet (a foreshadowing of the role which won him an Oscar in Arthur in 1981). Poirot’s interviews with these two – where Albert Finney is able to get a real rhythm going with the other performer – are easily the best. Other definite successes are Rachel Roberts (a Teutonic lady’s companion), the charmingly nuanced Jean-Pierre Cassel (the French conductor of the sleeping car) and, in smaller parts, Colin Blakely (a Pinkerton’s detective – bizarrely named ‘Colin Blankey’ in the opening credits!) and Denis Quilley (an Italian-American car salesman). Anthony Perkins’ twitchy, neurasthenic McQueen is very entertaining, yet I felt sorry watching him – sorry that his wonderful characterisation in Psycho defined Perkins forever. There are some disappointments too: Wendy Hiller’s Russian accent as the Princess Dragomiroff is intentionally overdone but it’s still not funny; Vanessa Redgrave is too creepy as a young Englishwoman returning from a stint as a shorthand teacher in Baghdad. Lauren Bacall and Sean Connery are undoubted stars but their lack of nimbleness as character actors is exposed in this company. Michael York is hopeless as a supposedly passionate Hungarian, although Jacqueline Bisset is not only stunningly pretty but surprisingly touching as his wife.
4 November 2011