Gateway Cinephiles

3-Minute Intro: Murder on the Orient Express

Screened: January 18, 2008
Format: DVD - Paramount (2004)
Selected By: Beth

Sidney Lumet’s 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is easy to overlook amid the director’s imposing filmography, but it stands out as one of the finest films ever made in the traditional consulting detective genre. An 84-year old Christie, who would pass away less than two years after Murder’s premiere, declared that she was completely satisfied with Lumet’s adaptation, typically dry praise bestowed on no other film version of her work. Murder gathered together a cast as impressive as Lumet would ever work with: Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Vanessa Redgrave, Jacqueline Bisset, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins, and still more. The film’s shooting schedule had to accommodate concurrent appearances by many of these luminaries on the London stage.

The elegance of Christie’s story, and in Lumet’s and screenwriter Paul Dehn’s faithful adaptation, lies both in its lean traditionalism and its unconventional twists. Fundamentally, Murder is a familiar locked room mystery. Here, the room is the titular train, stalled by a snowdrift somewhere deep in the Balkans. The story’s mystery evokes the Lindbergh kidnapping that likely fascinated Christie’s contemporary readers. This ripped-from-the-headlines conceit would eventually come to typify legions of crime dramas. Eschewing the tidy resolution of the typical consulting detective story, Murder offers not one but two possible solutions—one brutishly simple, one positively epic in its complexity.

Typically for Lumet, Murder is characterized by the director’s inclination for intimate storytelling and technical innovation. The tight confines of the set demanded a pioneering use of radio microphones for a feature film, and forced Lumet to shoot the climax multiple times in order to obtain the angles he desired. Albert Finney, as Christie’s beloved detective Hercule Poirot, was particularly taxed by these repeated shoots, as his concluding monologue was eight pages long. Finney came to regret the role, which for some time solidified a fictional image of him as a 55-year-old Belgian (Finney was 38 and English). Although Peter Ustinov’s portrayal in later films would become a more familiar incarnation of Poirot, Finney’s resolute performance, combined with a truly all-star cast and Lumet’s craft, established Murder as the definitive adaptation of the most widely-read novelist in the world.