Lord Edgware Dies (Realart/RKO, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 10:15 last nightr I ran my husband Charles a movie off YouTube: Lord Edgware Dies, the earliest existing film of one of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories. The person who posted this to YouTube suggested there were actually three Poirot films and Lord Edgware Dies was the third of them but the only one which actually survived. It was interesting to see this movie but I’m not holding my breath for the rediscovery of the other two, for Lord Edgware Dies is an excruciatingly dull film. If the 1937 Love with a Stranger, based on a Christie story called “Philomel Cottage,” was an example of a great film adapted from Christie (though, as I wrote about it when Charles and I saw it nearly a decade ago, it was “a real surprise since it’s a psychological thriller rather than a whodunit, and is one of the few times in her writing career that Christie actually gave a damn about character development and real emotion instead of just creating stick-figure people and having them enact a murder mystery”), Lord Edgware Dies was an example of a mediocre and surprisingly dull film.

The script by H. Fowler Mear plods along through a typical Christie murder mystery in which an American movie star, Jane Wilkinson (Jane Carr), married to British aristocrat Lord Edgware (C. V. France), wants to divorce him so she can marry an even richer guy from the British nobility, the Duke of Merton (Esmé Percy, who four years earlier had played the marvelous Gay half-breed character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!). Then Lord Edgware gets himself stabbed to death and Lady Edgware is the prime suspect, and Inspector Lestrade – oops, I mean Japp (John Turnbull) – of Scotland Yard is unshakably convinced that she did it until she produces an elaborate alibi that she was at a dinner party at which her long-suffering American co-star and admirer, Bryan Martin (Leslie Perrin), was also present. The film actually opens during this party, in which a woman impressionist, Charlotte Adams, performs a musical number presented as her tribute to Lady Edgware (though since we never see Jane Carr perform we have no idea just how good an imitation she did), and later she’s found dead as well, poisoned by an overdose of sleeping powder, as is a third person, Donald Ross.

Eventually Hercule Poirot (Austin Trevor) deduces that Lady Edgware did in fact kill all three people, then planted phony alibi clues to make it seem like she’d been at the party all night when in fact she’d slipped away long enough to kill her husband and announce her presence to the household staff to make it seem like she was guilty until her alibi evidence turned up. She had to kill both Charlotte and Ross because they could have confirmed that she lad left the party, and in a Wikipedia page on the novel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Edgware_Dies) it’s explained – as it was not in the film – that the reason she had to kill Lord Edgware instead of simply divorcing him was that the Duke of Merton was deeply religious and, as a matter of faith, would not marry a divorced woman. (I would have assumed it was the 1930’s version of a pre-nup that barred her from getting more than a fraction of his estate if they divorced, but if he died she’d inherit all his money.)

I really don’t like alleged whodunits in which the most obvious suspect turns out to be the guilty party – not only because I feel like the author is cheating, but also because endings like that give me the impression that our time has been wasted giving us otler suspects (including Lord Edgware’s nephew, Captain Roland Marsh [Michael Shepley], whom he’d disinherited over Marsh’s financial scrapes which he was always asking his uncle to bail him out of) as red herrings. Also, this film is rather dully directed – at the time Britain had two directors who actually knew how to make exciting, suspenseful thrillers, Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Stevenson, but instead of getting one of them, the company behind this film (“Realart,” a British studio that operated the Twickenham facility where, 35 years after this movie, the Beatles would shoot the first third of their final film, Let It Be, recently reissued in a vastly expanded six-hour “streaming” format as Get Back with Peter Jackson re-editing the footage and expanding it as is his wont – this is the guy who did a three-part, eight-hour film cycle based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s normal-length novel The Hobbit) signed Henry Edwards, a thoroughly boring director.

Edwards got his big break as both actor and director in a 1915 film called A Welsh Singer – which seems like an odd title indeed for a silent film – and he worked as a director until 1937 but kept acting, at least in bit parts (like the coroner in the 1952 British remake of Trent’s Last Case), until his death on November 2, 1952. It’s indicative of what a mediocre talent he was that he stayed in Britain and never got a job offer to work in the U.S., as Hitchcock and Stevenson both did. Hitchcock’s American career was long and illustrious; Stevenson’s not so much, though he got the plum assignment to direct the 1943 Jane Eyre with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. As usual, Welles tried to take over the direction and in her autobiography Fontaine boasted that she preserved Stevenson’s authority over the production by insisting she would take notes on her performance only from Stevenson, not Welles. Later he got a sinecure at Disney, directing Mary Poppins and The Love Bug, though I remember when I saw the 1943 Jane Eyre with Charles and there was a marvelously Gothic scene of Welles as Rochester frantically riding across the English moors on a stormy night, I joked, “This looks far more like the work of the man who made Citizen Kane than the man who made Mary Poppins.”

But getting back to Lord Edgware Dies and the man who actually did direct it rather than one of the men who should have, one annoying aspect of the movie is that Austin Trevor does not at any time sound convincing as a Frenchman – and Jane Carr and Leslie Perrins don’t sound convincing as Americans, either. (This film reminded me of George Bernard Shaw’s famous bon mot that Britain and America are “two countries divided by a common language.”) Trevor remained the only person to play Hercule Poirot until 1974, when Albert Finney took on the role in the big-budgeted all-star film Murder on the Orient Express, which Christie, who had just a little over a year to live when the film came out,. hailed as one of only two films based on her works which she’d actually liked. (The other was Witness for the Prosecution.)

Two years after Christie’s death in 1976, the production team on Murder on the Orient Express reteamed for another Christie-based film, Death on the Nile, though this time Peter Ustinov played Poirot (as he did in a 1986 TV-movie called Dead Man’s Folly). More recently both those stories have been remade, Murder on the Orient Express in 2017 and Death on the Nile in 2022, with Kenneth Branagh both directing and starring as Poirot. (One wonders why the producers sought to remake Christie stories that had already been filmed successfully instead of reaching deeper into her extensive oeuvre.) But probably the most influential films based on Christie’s Poirot character were the British TV series episodes from 1989 to 2014 with David Suchet putting his inimitable “stamp” on Poirot over the quarter-century his show ran, and after seeing the dimension Suchet gave to the character, including a wry sense of real wit, it’s a bit hard, to say the least, to accept someone as stiff and un-charming as Austin Trevor in the role!