Teresa Reviews “Lord Edgware Dies” (1934): Early Poirot

Fidelity to text: 3 1/2 knives
For an 80-minute-long film, they crammed most of the story in. Regrettably, they omitted two major plot points. Even more regrettably, Austin Trevor must be the worst Poirot ever. He’s tall, lean, and doesn’t have a mustache. I thought he was supposed to be Hastings as the actor playing Hastings — short, round, and with a mustache— would have fit the bill much better.

Quality of movie on its own: 2 1/2 knives
For an 80-minute film, it drags. The pace is glacial. All the actors seem made of wood. The action never goes outside of a building. All the sets look similar to one another, making sure the audience gets confused as to where the action is taking place. The two most important roles (Poirot and Hastings) are woefully miscast. Among a forgettable cast, the actress playing Jane Wilkinson (aka Lady Edgware) stood out. Jane Carr lit up the screen and made us believe her motivations. Too bad the script fell apart in the ending, doing a real disservice to Ms. Carr in both the film and her career.

This was interesting. Interesting is a good word because it doesn’t imply a value of “good”, merely … interesting. It’s a curiosity. This is probably the oldest filmed version of an Agatha Christie adaptation floating around. Other, older films are lost or buried deep inside U.S. Army warehouses — next to the Ark of the Covenant — never to be seen again.

Already, this film demonstrates all the reasons Agatha didn’t care for movie versions, although she did like her plays. She wrote plenty of them, after all. However, her plays were written as plays and thus fit within a set running time and were designed to work on a stage with whomever the casting director could dredge up. Everything a novel needs is jettisoned by a playwright.

Movies are different. Movies tend to reuse existing novels. The studio hacks the novel into shreds to make the story fit onto a screen. Then the director casts whomever the studio wants to promote, despite having other, far more capable and appropriate actors available. We’ll start with Austin Trevor, the actor playing Hercule Poirot.

He’s too darned tall. He was one of the tallest men on screen. Tall, thin, no mustache. He looked nothing like our image of Poirot, whether it be Peter Ustinov, Albert Finney, David Suchet, Kenneth Branagh, or even John Malkovich. Many other actors played Poirot over the years but they, too, look more like Hercule than Austin Trevor did. Some of his stiff woodenness was an artifact of moviemaking at the time, but not all of it.

Richard Cooper, portraying Captain Arthur Hastings, was equally miscast. He actually has Poirot’s round, short silhouette and sports a mustache. In fact, at first, I thought he was Hastings until both actors came to life and began acting. Trevor gave us a bad Belgian accent to indicate who he was, but otherwise nothing about him said Poirot. As Hastings, Richard Cooper played the buffoon in virtually every scene, but alas, he did not steal those scenes. I know that Hastings started out as a parody of Watson but Agatha never wrote him as a complete idiot.

An idiot to be sure, but a partial one. Her Captain Hastings never walked into walls, while this Hastings does.

If you know the plot of Lord Edgware Dies (in the United States, the novel was retitled Thirteen at Dinner although the movie was not), you’ll see that the overall story arc is followed closely, after making allowances for an extremely short running time. Most of the minor characters, including the Duchess of Merton, vanish without a trace. Oddly, the Covent Garden taxi driver gets several minutes of screen time, allowing the director to make Hastings the butt of another joke.

That was a poor choice because it forced the screenwriter to omit two crucial parts of the plot. The first was why Lord Edgware had to die. Bill had to ask me and since I’d read the book, I knew. Bad scriptwriter, bad scriptwriter. The second major omission was how Poirot came to realize who stabbed Lord Edgware in the back of the neck with a corn knife. That entire sequence, involving the Judgement of Paris, was skipped but it’s crucial to understanding how Poirot worked out the solution.

The Judgement of Paris is also crucial in understanding why victim number three had to die, stabbed by the same corn knife.

After watching the film, I finally googled corn knives because I kept seeing in my head a machete used to chop down cornstalks. A corn knife never shows up in this film, by the way. Back in 1934, movies didn’t show murder victims sprawled out on the floor in pools of blood with knives sticking out of them. At least classy movies didn’t do this although I don’t know about low-rent films for the tenement market.

Understanding what a corn knife is helps to understand how the murderer killed the victims. The novel doesn’t go into gruesome detail (Agatha never does) but she does explain how the murderer knew how to utilize a corn knife most effectively and not for its intended purpose. And it fits! It’s perfectly in keeping with the murderer’s character.

A turn-of-the-century corn knife was used to shave off corns on the feet. They have a long, narrow, razor-sharp blade, the better to shave off layers of bad skin without removing healthy skin. It’s home surgery on your feet. Apparently, they were common in England so Agatha assumed when she used the phrase “corn knife” in the text, everyone would understand her.

As I mentioned previously, I had something quite different in mind and never could figure out how the murderer smuggled a machete around in 1930s vintage London. The murderer didn’t. The passage of decades and medical techniques concealed the past. And, demonstrating poor choices on the director’s part, we never see a corn knife so we don’t know how easily one can be smuggled inside and then wielded at the last moment, surprising the victim.

Agatha also assumes that you, dear reader, recognize the story of the Judgement of Paris. Paris is the handsome young son of Priam of Troy. He has to decide which of the goddesses (Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena) are the most beautiful.

The goddesses all bribe him. He likes Aphrodite’s bribe the best (Helen of Troy) and from that decision we move onto the Iliad, followed by the Odyssey.

The Judgment of Paris works beautifully in the novel. It demonstrates who’s had an education and who has not. It reveals hidden identities. It’s a crime that the scriptwriter omitted it entirely because without this scene, the final murder and the unveiling don’t make much sense. Again, Agatha didn’t like the movie versions of her novels because she didn’t like watching her carefully constructed plots get butchered to suit some director’s “vision.”

Overall, this was … interesting.

I wouldn’t watch it again. I am much more interested now in seeing David Suchet’s version. You can bet I’ll be looking for the scene with the Judgement of Paris. It will also be refreshing to watch a Poirot who looks like my mental image of Poirot instead of a long, lean, rangy, tall man who’s been shaved within an inch of his life, being closely shadowed by a clone of Tweedledee.

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