by Jake Hjort, Contributing Writer
Welcome back, fellow time travelers, to another edition of 20th Century Flicks! This month, in a continued effort to check classic cinema off of my list of shame, I’m diving back to the year 1974 to watch Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express. As I carry on with my journey to cover some of Hollywood’s greatest directors of the 20th century, I figured my quest would not be complete without a look-in on Lumet, whose legendary filmography is full of incredible work. Orient Express also gives me, for the first time in the year I’ve been writing this column, an opportunity to evaluate a film for which I have familiarity with the source material, as although I have not read the Agatha Christie novel from which the story is adapted, I have seen Kenneth Branagh’s 2017 adaptation.
Aboard the Orient Express as it travels through central Europe, legendary Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) finds himself faced with a surprise mystery to solve when a fellow passenger (Richard Widmark) is found dead in his compartment. After discovering that the victim was himself a criminal wanted for the kidnapping and murder of Daisy Armstrong, an American toddler, Poirot sets out to investigate the killing, quickly discovering that just about everyone else on the train has secrets to hide and could be a possible suspect. Eventually, Poirot discovers that the murder was not carried out by just one or two of his possible suspects, but by all of them. Indeed, all of the other passengers had connections to the Armstrong family, and joined together in a grand conspiracy to bring her murderer karmic justice. However, facing a crisis of conscience, Poirot decides not to share his discovery of this conspiracy with the police, instead feeding them a false alternative of an unidentified mafia assailant who fled off into the night.
Like with any traditional murder mystery, much of the success of Murder on the Orient Express lies on the shoulders of the actor portraying its detective protagonist. Finney is certainly a talented actor with many highly acclaimed performances (including this one, for many people), but his portrayal of Poirot doesn’t quite work for me. Poirot is supposed to be an eccentric character so I don’t mind that he’s a bit of an oddball, but there’s a tonal mismatch between him and the rest of the characters in the film. In a world where everyone else is playing it straight, Finney’s peculiarities stand out like a sore thumb, reminding me a bit of Benoit Blanc, but without the rest of the absurdity of the Knives Out films. Additionally, I never really got the impression that Poirot is as talented as a detective as he is purported to be. His investigative prowess is told to the viewer many times, but I don’t think the film does enough to show his intelligence until his monologue at the finale, where he pieces together the case.
Poirot aside, a lot of the supporting characters and performances really shine. Of course, the first I have to mention is Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar-winning performance as Greta Ohlsson, a Swedish nun who had formerly been Daisy’s nanny. It’s a fairly small role, but she gets one unbroken monologue that’s nearly five minutes long — it shows an incredibly impressive range of emotions. Sean Connery is expectedly great as well, playing Colonel John Arbuthnot, an officer in the Indian army who had served with Daisy’s father in World War I. Aside from the faces that I recognized coming in, I also really enjoyed the performances of Jean-Pierre Cassel as the conductor Pierre, Lauren Bacall as Daisy’s grandmother Linda Arden, and Anthony Perkins as Hector McQueen.
As I was watching the movie, something struck me as particularly odd: Although I remembered a lot of the story beats, clues, and characters from the Branagh adaptation, I could not for the life of me remember which of them was the killer. Of course, the answer to this query is that literally all of the suspects on the train are the killer, which brings me to my biggest issue with Murder on the Orient Express: I don’t think that this is a very good murder mystery story. Of course, this hot take isn’t the fault of the film itself, as it’s just telling the story of a novel written 40 years prior, but I can’t help but feel a sour taste as the credits roll after what I find to be an incredibly unsatisfying ending. A lot of the fun of murder mysteries is trying to work alongside the detective and follow the clues, hoping that you’ve pegged the right suspect by the time of the dramatic reveal. As I was watching the film, apparently having blacked out any memory of the finale, I found myself wrapped up in that fun process, only to have the rug completely pulled out from underneath me when it turns out that any guess would have been correct. I’m fine with a few red herrings or a little bit of subversion — you don’t want it to be too obvious, after all — but this conclusion just feels like a slap in the face to anyone trying to follow along with the mystery.
Alright, story rant over. Back to the film itself. My issues with the plot and Poirot aside, I cannot deny that Lumet is an incredibly talented director, and that this is a really well-made film. The train feels like as much of a character here as the ship does in Titanic, not just in the beautiful production design of the interior sets, but also in the loving ways that its machinery is shot, and the ways in which the confinement of the corridors and compartments serve the film’s atmosphere. The tension is well-crafted as well, with an undercurrent of uncertainty present throughout, but never being overbearing. On top of that, the score, composed by Richard Rodney Bennett and performed beautifully by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, has a lot of lovely pieces, and I’ve already added the main theme to my classical music playlist.
So having now seen the story told by two different filmmakers over 40 years apart, how do the two adaptations compare? To put it bluntly, I’d say that Branagh makes for a better Poirot than Finney does, but that he is not as talented a director as Lumet. Branagh certainly infuses the character with the same sense of peculiarity as Finney, but I feel like he manages to keep the character a bit more grounded, and he heightens the whimsy of the rest of the world to match the character. On top of that, the intelligence of the character is much better demonstrated in Branagh’s portrayal, and he sports a much more impressive mustache than Finney does. However, the modern adaptation does lack Lumet’s precise direction, and Branagh wasn’t able to coax quite as impressive of performances out of his supporting cast as Lumet does.
Though I have my own personal complaints with the source material, Murder on the Orient Express is one of the most famous murder mystery stories ever told for a reason. With its iconic detective, memorable supporting cast, and contained setting, this is a story that any fan of mysteries should experience, and Lumet’s adaptation remains, by a close margin, the best telling of the story on the silver screen.
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