Murder on the Orient Express
The Orient Express departing from platform one at nine o’clock on a cold winter evening in 1935, travelling from Istanbul via various stops to Calais from where connections are available to London, Hercule Poirot has neglected to make a reservation and all the first class sleeper berths are occupied, but fortunately he is on friendly terms with Signor Bianchi, a director of the railroad company who will also be travelling who makes arrangements for him to be accommodated.
His reputation well-known, Poirot is soon approached by the arrogant businessman Ratchett who says he has received death threats, asking for protection, something Poirot is not in a position to provide, but when Ratchett is murdered in the night, drugged and stabbed twelve times, it is inescapable that Poirot will be the one obliged to investigate, a crucial clue pointing to the kidnapping and murder of a child five years before, a charred note in the victim’s ashtray bearing the remnants of the name Daisy Armstrong.
A variation on the “country manor” murder where all the suspects are the guests and staff of an isolated fixed location, Murder on the Orient Express is ostensibly a whodunit in transit, though stalled in a deep snowdrift the tracks run parallel, based on the 1934 novel by Agatha Christie, her tenth book to feature Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, published in America as Murder in the Calais Coach and filmed in 1974 by Sidney Lumet from an adaptation by Paul Dehn with Albert Finney in the lead role, fastidious in his personal grooming and attention to the smallest of details.
Christie herself expressing that it was her favourite of the adaptations of her prolific literary corpus, the production is opulent, the travellers numbering royalty, ambassadors, senior military officers and their attendant staff, the ladies arriving dressed in luxurious furs and all of them opinionated, snooty, impatient, entitled and gossipy, though often very little which passes their lips can be trusted to be the truth, the dining car not the ideal venue to conduct interviews with the revolving door of suspects and witnesses.
A roster of established and rising international stars, Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins, Jacqueline Bisset, Michael York and Richard Widmark, it is three women who steal the limelight, Ingrid Bergman as nervous missionary Greta Ohlsson, Vanessa Redgrave as the luminous socialite Mary Debenham and Wendy Hiller as the elderly and imperious Princess Natalia Dragomiroff, each of them very different and everyone in the ensemble given a moment in the spotlight.
The opening act of introductions and departure slow, ironically Murder on the Orient Express gathers momentum as the train grinds to a halt, the film now restored in 4K as part of StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics collection and supported by a plethora of materials including a commentary, interviews with Bisset and York and producer Richard Goodwin, featurettes on aspects of the production and the cast and a gallery and the original trailer.
Murder on the Orient Express will be available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from StudioCanal from Monday 24th November alongside Death on the Nile, The Mirror Crack’d and Evil Under the Sun and a box set containing all four films, The Agatha Christie Collection
