Word: poirot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...victims are made--is killed in her stateroom while everyone else's attention is on the groom, who has been shot in the leg by the drunk, half-crazed woman he jilted to marry the heiress. Also on board this floating Orient Express is the legendary Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), who hears all, sees all, and eats all, at least to judge by his bulk. Add one American lawyer trying to cover up the fact that he has been embezzling the heiress's money, and balance with one English lawyer keeping his eye on the American lawyer. Throw...
...Egypt to protect himself. Ridgeway's English lawyers are watching him, and they dispatch David Niven to the scene. Simultaneously, the Viennese doctor is trying to persuade Ridgeway not to go on trying to ruin his clinic, which has caused her friend to die, and the Marxist and Poirot are on the same boat. Small world...
...husband can't walk with a broken leg. The doctor? He had a motive, which Poirot overheard while eavesdropping, but he seems too weakwilled to kill. The Marxist--who Poirot heard saying in a just world Ridgeway "would be killed as a warning to the others"--possible, but unlikely. The maid, who discovered the body, might have done it, since Ridgeway would not give her her salary and let her go to meet her husband-to-be. How about the socialite, who might have done it to get the pearls, which are discovered missing? Who knows...
...most significant victim is Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles), an heiress taking a Nile cruise for her honeymoon. As it develops, just about everyone in first class has both motive and opportunity to do her in. Naturally, one does not imagine that Dame Agatha's immortal detective, Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), pulled any triggers, and one can only spare the odd suspicious thought for Colonel Rice (David Niven), who assists him in his investigation. But that leaves plenty of others: Bette Davis as a dowager with a taste for pearls of the sort the late-lamented sported; Maggie Smith...
They are, manifestly, a diverse, and therefore amiable set of cruise companions, and unless one has read the book, it is impossible to break the case before Poirot does. The trouble with the thing is that though Shaffer (the author of Sleuth) can outline a highly stylized murder-mystery character, he seems to lack the energy to fill in the kind of details that can, in masterly hands, utterly charm and disarm. There are possibilities, for example, in the bickering of Davis and Smith, but they peter out. There are promising hints of giddiness in Farrow's lovelorn posturings...