Teresa Reviews “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974)

Fidelity to text: 4 1/2 knives.

It’s just about perfect except for Poirot. This version lets him get persuaded a little too easily. He’s normally dedicated to justice, and the film didn’t show his crisis of conscience well.

Quality of movie on its own: 4 1/2 knives.

So many stars! So much talent! They each deserved more minutes of screen time with less time devoted to scenes of steam locomotives chugging through the Balkans.

Wow. What a great movie, from start to finish. I loved the lengthy opening scene getting the Orient Express ready for its journey from Istanbul to Paris. It’s long; time that could have been spent showing off the stars but it showed the amount of work involved getting a luxury train ready to travel. The crowds in the Istanbul train station were equally fascinating. The director, Sidney Lumet, demonstrated that Istanbul is the crossroads between East and West, the center of Eurasia, visited by people from around the world. It sets up why such a wildly disparate group of travelers would be on the train in the first place.

After that, however, I could have done with fewer scenes of the Orient Express traveling through the Balkans. One wooded, snowy mountainside looks like another. That was time that could have been better spent giving each of the stars more screen time. I could have skipped the sequence in the weirdly empty Istanbul luxury restaurant too, despite the serious eye-candy setting on display, complete with live band. Yes, it sets up Poirot meeting the Orient Express’s director, M. Bianchi, and thus getting a seat on a fully-booked train. Even so, that was time that could have been spent on the train.

Worse, I just can’t buy Hercule Poirot tearing up a menu and tossing the shreds onto the table and floor. Poirot would not make a mess. Nor would he deliberately make a mess expecting someone else to clean it up.

I suppose that what this does is show that Sidney Lumet and Albert Finney’s Hercule Poirot is not like the others. Perhaps that’s why this Poirot didn’t seem too conflicted over which of his two deductions got chosen. Hercule Poirot is not a fan of vigilante justice, no matter how well-motivated or the crime being avenged, yet that disapproval didn’t come through as well as it could have.

Fortunately, the other stars were perfect for their roles. Let’s begin with Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Hubbard. She gets all the best lines, she’s funny, she’s sharp, and she doesn’t hesitate to snap at anyone, including the Princess Natalia Dragomiroff. The elderly Russian princess should be above sniping at noisy Americans but flamboyant Mrs. Hubbard gets under her skin. Mrs. Hubbard is the perfect annoying American tourist; so perfect and so typical that she becomes outrageous.

Her character got some changes from the novel because hey, it’s Lauren Bacall. She’s relying on the story spread about that she’s ill and in seclusion because of the Armstrong tragedy. That’s why she can assume no one will recognize that she’s the famous actress, Linda Arden. In the novel, Agatha spells out that Mrs. Hubbard wasn’t just loud and wearing bedazzled clothes. She put on some serious weight, making it harder for her fans to recognize her. In the movie — it’s subtle — it’s clear that Poirot does recognize her when he comments on her “playing her part” and asks “Why did you bring the dagger from the place?” Poirot had watched her portray Lady Macbeth — the dagger line is from the Scottish tragedy — and he remembered.

As the Russian Princess Dragonmiroff, Wendy Hiller is very much a Grande Dame, and she couldn’t possibly be involved in anything as plebian as the murder of some American gangster. She hasn’t just got a German lady’s maid. She’s got a pair of Pekinese dogs, beautifully trained. I was impressed with how well her dogs ate in the dining car. They had better manners than most of the passengers, I’m sure.

Oooh, there’s Sean Connery as Col. Arbuthnot. Very British, very stiff upper-lip, yet he, like a true gentleman, betrays himself when he leaps to Mary Debenham’s rescue. Poirot wasn’t surprised; he’d already seen them in a clinch on the ferryboat to Istanbul. As a professional detective and astute observer of human nature, you can trust Poirot to listen at keyholes and eavesdrops because he never knows when it’s going to be useful. And once again, he’s right! Spying casually on the British couple pays off when they claim they’re complete strangers on the Orient Express. Miss Debenham is played by Vanessa Redgrave, and you can tell she helped planned the sting. She’s far too competent and self-contained to stand on the sidelines and wait.

Ingrid Bergman plays Greta the missionary. She won an Oscar for the role. She perfectly embodied a damaged, distraught woman who found God as a result of tragedy. I didn’t like Poirot’s realization that Greta is lying because she didn’t know the word ”emolument.” That means salary or fee for professional reasons. I say this because my mother would have done what Greta did: smile tightly because she didn’t understand the word and then look it up later in the dictionary. My mother would not have asked what that strange word meant because asking made her look stupid. No heavily accented immigrant trying to fit in is going to make it harder on themselves, so no, I don’t accept this clue, either from Agatha or from Poirot.

These stars are just the beginning of the all-star cast. Sidney Lumet chose actors and actresses the public already knew to make it easier to tell the story. He understood it would be much easier to keep everyone straight up onscreen, especially if a star only got a few minutes to emote. It’s too easy for the audience to get mixed up with a large cast. It worked for me: I was always able to tell everyone apart. I can’t say that for many movies: too many anonymous blondies and Ken doll knock-offs who all look alike in their plastic prettiness. I like variety in my casting, and I got it here.

Unfortunately, as I said, too many scenes of trains chugging down the tracks meant not enough screen time for the stars. I would have liked to have seen more of Mr. Hardman (Colin Blakely) and Foscarelli (Denis Quilley). They both lit up the screen when they appeared. I especially enjoyed Michal York as Count Andrenyi and Jacqueline Bisset as his countess. York and Bisset got about 10 minutes screen time between the two of them. I wanted more. But the movie was already two hours and eight minutes long.

Back in 1974, they didn’t make these nearly three hours slog-fests that blockbusters all seem to be today. This film could have been longer, and it would have still zipped along. Or Sidney Lumet could have filmed fewer scenes of trains rolling down the track. Either way, don’t miss this version of Murder on the Orient Express.

Agatha liked it, and you can’t get a better recommendation than that.