Word: poirot
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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...
...central character is Poirot, played by Albert Finney; he's like a chess player who takes on a dozen opponents simultaneously. Finney's performance is the stumbling-block to the film's otherwise smooth accomplishment of its limited purpose. Finney plays Poirot as an affable tailor's dummy of a man, who wears a hairnet and a moustache band to sleep every night, and whose moustache, indeed, doesn't move when he talks. Poirot is not the coolest of detectives; he's always in control of the situation (this is no Chinatown or Maltese Falcon) but he doesn't care...
They got Albert Finney to play Hercule Poirot. They also got, in alphabetical order as protocol dictates, Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Rachel Roberts, Richard Widmark and Michael York, all as murder suspects. And still they got nothing...
Falling under the suspicion of the eccentric and generally insufferable sleuth Poirot is practically everyone else aboard the coach-twelve to be exact, a number that will assume unlikely significance before the piece is played...
...Movie Director Sidney Lumet will need all his little gray cells, as Agatha Christie would put it. Next month he starts shooting outside London her 40-year-old thriller Murder on the Orient Express. Albert Finney will play Christie's eggheaded detective Hercule Poirot...