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Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

Considering it's one of the most famous books of the 20th century there have been surprisingly few adaptations of Murder on the Orient Express. Even the peerless David Suchet - for reasons of rights-hell rather than artistic preference - has yet to board the fatal train. Aside from a 2001 adaptation starring Alfred Molina (which is set in the present day and can therefore safely be vomited from the canon) there is only the 1974 movie to put the lethal journey on screen and take liberties. I've seen the film twice now - once when I was technically in shock and once last night because I'd been listening to the Radio 4 adaptation in the car and wanted to compare the two. I've also read the book a couple of times and, although not as hard-line in my opinions as to what is and isn't right as I am with The Hound, I wanted to see what they did with it. Is there, for example, much scope to change the classic text? What follows contains spoilers - the book is over 80 years old so I could assume you all know the big twist but in case you don't be warned. You might want to stop here.

Although Peter Ustinov is most famous for playing Poirot in 1970s films, it is Albert Finney who dons the comical moustaches for this movie. He was apparently nominated for an Oscar for his performance. To be fair he does command the screen and is a credible Belgian. But he also plays Poirot as a weird hunchback who has to scuttle round 90 degrees just to look at someone (and squint up at them even though he's usually taller than they are). Poirot is, as the author regularly has people point out, a funny little man. He is faintly absurd in both his looks and his appearance. He has silly facial hair, he spends far too often prettying himself up, he is immaculate in every way and is all but helpless without his array of different sized combs. What he isn't is a freakish, Nosferatu look-a-like who learned his craft at the Peter Sellars school of foreign detectives. Obviously we've been spoilt by David Suchet's performance (surely now definitive even if he was actually far too young to play a retired detective like Poirot. But who are we to quibble - even Dame Agatha says she made a mistake making Poirot so old and promptly ignored the passage of time and had Poirot not age much between stories set in the 20s and in the 60s - only in "Curtain - Poirot's Last Case" does he show his age but I'm straying from the straight and pointy). Yes - Suchet's performance - we're spoilt by it and everyone is going to be judged against it but surely anyone who has eyes could see that Finney is too grotesque to be a satisfying Poirot. His movements are too jerky and his accent too often comical. If Albert Finney had been just another actor it could be excused but he's supposed to be pretty good isn't he?

Back to the plot at the limitations that are built into Murder on the Orient Express. Normal practice when jazzing up a novel is to either add new characters or remove old ones. You might get another pretty girl or ditch three old guys and give their lines to a newly minted American man played by a Steve McQueen. You can't do that with "Murder..." - the plot rests on there being 12 people in that carriage. You have a little leeway as to who they are but as each must fulfil a certain tranche of back-story and entanglement, you don't have much. This film tinkers a bit - the butler gets a new name, one of the women now babbles about "little brown babies", the Americans are generally louder and more crudely drawn - but it is a case of simply matching the familiar name with the star and making a nice filmic jigsaw.

For the cast is indeed formidable. This was a film designed to get bums on seats so in come Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Lauren Bacall, Michael York, Anthony Perkins and many more. You can barely move on that luxury train for famous faces trying to pass themselves off as natives. None seems obviously miscast and all are happy to remain as secondary characters to be interviewed and then put back into storage. For me the greatest joy was realising that Doctor Constantine was played by Arbitan from "The Keys of Marinus". I suspect I'm close to being alone in that.

There are little things which are slightly annoying - the mysterious dressing gown changes colour from red to white (ironic as it is a deliberate red herring), Poirot picks up on Vanessa's use of an Americanism and uses it as evidence that she's lying even though the rest of the cast use Americanisms just because the film was aimed at American audiences, M. Bouc becomes M. Bianchi for no obvious reason (perhaps because Americans like Italians more than Frenchmen?) The film opens with a montage about the Armstrong kidnapping case - telling the whole story from kidnap to death - signposting to the unaware that this is a story about the aftermath of the kidnap and murder of a baby. In the book it leaks out in bits - here it is thrust in our faces. It isn't actually spoiling anything and they obviously felt that the film needed to start with something more dramatic than fifteen people climbing onto a train but it feels like a tacky way to start the film. Snippets of this montage are clumsily inserted later when Poirot is exposing each passenger's true identity.

"You are the secretary" says Poirot, the screen turns over to show two seconds of a crowd scene in which there might've been a secretary, the screen turns back and he carries on talking.

What I like about the film is the way it doesn't attempt to spice it up with anything new. Some of the minor changes feel pointless and irritating but what you see is largely what was written fifty years earlier. Much as I want to see the Suchet version, I fear what they'll do with it. What started out as faithful adaptations have become rather grander and more sensationalised and I'm worried that Miss Debenham will decide she's a lesbian and leave Colonel Arbuthnot, Cassetti will have done more to Daisy Armstrong than just kill her, the stranded train will be threatened by wolves/bandits/enemy soldiers and Monsieur Bouc will turn out to be the murderer.

Murder on the Orient Express is a dry book with a brilliant payoff - this film tried to distract us from the dryness of Poirot's investigation with movie stars and a touch of Hollywood. There's nothing wrong with that. I just wish they'd got a less mutated performance out of Albert Finney.