Word: expression
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nearly formless color. Indeed, Clark finds romanticism's unconscious beginnings in the work of the last great classicist, David, and in Goya, deaf, hating and isolated beyond the Pyrenees. As before, Clark is wonderfully deft at demonstrating the cross-pollination of ideas and more than ever willing to express his own impatience with the second-rate. Even his beloved Turner is charged with doing some "corny" paintings...
Murder on the Orient Express is, self-consciously, the kind of high quality all-star film that was made in the thirties and forties. It aims for the elegant, epigrammatic quality of films like Casablanca, where even the cameos are memorable and throwaway lines seem pregnant with mysterious meaning. Everyone who says anything in Murder on the Orient Express is a distinguished, if not a great, actor or actress. It's silly, but a lot of fun, to have an actress like Ingrid Bergman playing a Scandanavian nanny who "was born backwards" and has visions of "little brown babies...
...filters and slow motion make it into a ballet of form, a non-human prelude to a film that for the rest of its length is nothing but people talking at each other. Next Lumet shows us his cast assembling from all over the world to board the Orient Express at Istanbul. There's the involuntary shudder of pleasure when you recognize a regal Vanessa Redgrave sailing through a crowd of Turkish peddlers, as Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset airily overturn a huge cart of oranges and step up into their carriage. Best of all, the Orient Express itself billows...
CAUGHT IN SUCH a limbo, Hercules Poirot proceeds to solve the mystery. Nowadays, almost any TV detective show has a slicker, more plausible and more difficult plot than Murder on the Orient Express. The mystery seems secondary to the gallery of eccentrics it brings together. The best things in the movie are irrelevant to the story of murder and its solution. Poirot interrogates his witnesses, for example, with George Coulouris and Martin Balsam sitting on the sidelines. Whenever one witness leaves the cabin, one of the two roundly asserts, "He did it" and the other scoffs; when the next witness...
Murder on the Orient Express emphasizes the sentimental aspects of the Agatha Christie novel it's based on. It presents no layer of cynicism to be penetrated, the kind of tough-minded shell Bogart provided to make sure the final pill wasn't too sweet to swallow. The moral situation on the Orient Express is black and white, and the detective shares everyone's assumptions about right and wrong. There can be no classic confrontations because at bottom everyone agrees. This film doesn't have the kind of hypnotic effect that leaves you spouting its dialogue days later...