Word: oriented
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MURDER ON THE Orient Express is the biggest-budget British film ever made, but compared to American blockbusters like The Great Gatsby and Cleopatra, it is an understated film. Europeans don't have the same problems reconciling big money with culture that American artists and moguls use as an excuse for avoiding excellence. Give Fellini and Resnais and Bunuel more money to make a film than they ever dreamed of any they make films that are, indeed, different from their earlier, low-budget works, but films of undoubted high quality. In America, the big money goes only to those directors...
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...
...blue 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...
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...