When Kenneth Branagh made the 2017 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, I opted to read the novel it was based on before seeing it. I knew the detective Hercule Poirot mostly from when my parents watched this fussy guy with a noteworthy mustache solve crimes in a rather cocky way on a British TV version of Christie’s stories that used to run on PBS all the time. I wasn’t much of a fan. But I did end up liking Branagh’s movie. It was fine, not the greatest thing ever, but I was entertained during the run time, and it did what it had to establish the Poirot character with Branagh wearing an even more ridiculous mustache. Branagh tossed a couple quick action scenes and changed some of the characters around to make the cast more multiracial, and I am fine with the latter, but for the most part, it was more or less faithful to Christie’s book.
Whether Christie herself would approve of such changes I couldn’t say. She apparently only really liked two film versions of her work, and one of them was the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express. The other was Witness for the Prosecution directed by the great Billy Wilder, but I’m reviewing Murder on the Orient Express right now.
The set-up is simple and basic: a man is murdered on a moving train car during a very short window of time in the middle of the night. The only people who could have possibly committed the crime are the passengers and crew on the train car at that moment. Among them is one Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney), a brilliant Belgian detective whose only faults seem to be a (admittedly earned) high opinion of his own detective skills and a high level of vanity when it comes to his facial hair. He was only on that car by chance, so he alone is in the clear. With help from a doctor and the railroad executive who got Poirot his place on the train–those two were on a separate car when the victim died–Poirot takes the case, soon learning the dead man was a rather despicable crime boss with a lot of enemies and a connection to a particularly heinous kidnapping and murder case in the United States. Addtionally, Poirot’s seemingly light probing reveals a number of the people in the car actually had connections to the dead man, and the others, well, they sure are a suspicious lot on their own. With so many suspects, can Poirot finger the real murderer? And did the dead man have it coming?
The ending of Murder on the Orient Express is actually rather famous, and it is perhaps the best example possible of Christie’s style of murder mystery where a group of suspects are shut away somewhere remotely, creating a very limited number of possible killers even as the case itself may seem baffling to the reader. I won’t say more than that–as well known as the ending is, it is still worth discovering on its own for reader or viewer–but will add that Poirot isn’t much of a character in the sense that he is a three dimensional figure with hopes, aspirations, and goals beyond solving this seemingly impossible case. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that he will. Poirot is a Sherlock Holmes style detective, one who notices small things others miss and can’t help but solve the case even as he praises himself for doing so. Finney plays the role as basically a fussy man who notices everything. That’s about all Poirot is, and that’s fine.
That said, it isn’t hard to see why Chrisite liked this version. Director Sidney Lumet and writer Paul Dehn stick very close to Christie’s novel in retelling the story. There’s a short prologue featuring an overview of the kidnapping, but beyond that, much of the movie like much of the book is just Poirot interviewing the different people on the car, occasionally with the doctor or the railroad executive chiming in to say they feel a particularly guilty-seeming person much have done it only for Poirot to demur until he has interviewed everybody. It’s not an overly exciting story full of fight scenes or chases. It’s just a man asking questions on a somewhat cramped train car, complete with some flashbacks to earlier in the evening to show where different characters were as they tell their stories. There’s some humor in that Poirot would rather not hear too much from Lauren Bacall’s Mrs. Hubbard, a woman seemingly incapable of answering a straight question with a lot of other opinions, but otherwise, it’s a fairly straightforward story: Poirot asks some questions, looks around some of the cars, and then gathers everyone together to explain who the killer is as the train is stuck in a snowdrift before they get to the next station to let the local authorities take over.
Still, there’s a lot of charm here, especially as this is one of those all-star casts where the suspect list includes a lot of familiar faces such as Anthony Perkins, Michael York, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman (who got an Oscar for this movie), the aforementioned Bacall, John Gielgud, and Jacqueline Bisset. If nothing else, seeing a lot of famous faces try to convince a very smart man they didn’t kill an odious criminal is fun by itself. The movie is stylish, moves well, and tells the story it has to without anyone firing a gun at the detective (Branagh couldn’t get that much done). That’s a good mystery when you get right down to it, and for a movie like this, it’s the murder mystery that’s the real star. And here, it works out just fine.
Grade: A-
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