Murder on the Orient Express (EMI Film Distributors, G. W. Films Limited, Paramount, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Eventually last night my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies, both in the mystery-suspense genre, Murder on the Orient Express (the original 1974 version) and In the Heat of the Night. Murder on the Orient Express was based on a novel by Agatha Christie called Murder in the Calais Coach (apparently the individual cars on the legendary Orient Express train from Istanbul to Calais each had their own names) published, at least according to Amazon.com’s listing, on January 1, 1933. By now just about everyone knows the “spoiler” ending Christie concocted for this story: all the suspects are guilty of killing the victim, American businessman John Ratchett (Richard Widmark),whose real name turns out to be “Castelli.” I read Murder in the Calais Coach but only in the late 1970’s, and my only recollection of it his that Christie nade the victim a child molester and had the families of his victims unite to do him in on the train. For the movie screenwriter Paul Dehn changed the backstory and drew on the 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. – though he changed the family’s name from “Lindbergh” to “Amrstrong,” made them British instead of American, moved the kidnapping up two years to 1930 and changed the kidnapping victim from a son to a daughter, Daisy. Not only did Daisy get killed by her kidnapper, but Daisy’s mother died in childbirth, her second baby was stillborn, the Armstrongs’ maid – who was wrongly accused of complicity in the kidnapping – killed herself, and so did Col. Armstrong after the loss of both his daughter and his wife. Another man was arrested, convicted and executed for the kidnapping, but according to Dehn’s script Ratchett a.k.a. Castelli masterminded the whole crime, thereby leaving lots of people who hated him.

Among them are American actress Mrs. Hubbard (Lauren Bacall), Swedish housemaid Greta (Ingrid Bergman), aspiring actor McQueen (Anthony Perkins), Col. Armstrong’s former butler Beddoes (John Gielgud), Russian Countess Andreyva (Jacqueline Bisset) and her Hungarian diplomat husband (Michael York), Col. Arbuthnot (Sean Connery) – a veteran of the Gurkhas (native troops commanded by the Brits during the Indian raj) – and his girlfriend Mary Debenham (Vanessa Redgrave), whom he can’t marry because he already has a wife and he’s scared of being seen with Mary because his wife could use that against him in their divorce (I vividly remember movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 Easy Virtue and James Whale’s 1934 One More River as examples of how combative British divorces could be in this era), plus assorted figures including Bianchi (Martin Balsam), Pierre (Jean Pierre Casell), Hardman (Colin Blakely), Hildegarde (Rachel Roberts) and Princess Dragomiroff (Wendy Hiller in the role producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin originally wanted Bergman for, but she turned it town and asked to play Greta instead because Greta, like Bergman, was Swedish). There’s also a doctor (George Coulouris from Citizen Kane) who jumps to the conclusion, after Christie’s most famous “sleuth” character, Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney), interrogates each suspect in turn, that that person is the murderer.

Murder on the Orient Express was finished just a few months before Agatha Christie died, and it was screened for her and she liked it – only the second time she’d liked any of the films made from her work. (The first was Billy Wilder’s marvelous film of Christie’s play Witness for the Prosecution, made in 1957 and the last completed film of Tyrone Power.) Murder on the Orient Express isn’t that great a movie; the director is Sidney Lumet, but he did much better films than this. Albert Finney way overacts as Poirot – it’s true Agatha Christie wrote the character as a series of exaggerated mannerisms, but David Sachet in the long-running BBC-TV series of Poirot’s adventures showed you could make the character less forbidding and more human than Finney does here. There is a touch of Sherlock Holmes’s nobility in the way Poirot decides at the end to let the murderers get away with it, pinning the crime instead on an unknown (and nonexistent) man who supposedly stole a porter’s uniform, committed the crime and then escaped from the train while it was stuck behind a snowbank (the last scene of the film shows a “plow train” pushing snow out of the way of the tracks so the Orient Express can go on its merry way). This suggests an interesting possibility for a sequel: a man is actually arrested and charged with being the killer, and Poirot and the others have a crisis of conscience over whether they should come forward with the preposterous truth or let an innocent man hang for the crime.

Raymond Chandler was scathing in his comments about Murder in the Calais Coach, calling it “the sort of thing that would throw the most intelligent reader for a loop. Only a half-wit could guess it.” Chandler generally couldn’t stand Christie – in one of his letters he named Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner as the best-selling mystery writers of his time, and said he couldn’t be objective about them for opposite reasons (he couldn’t stand Christie, while he and Gardner were close friends), and the particular reason Chandler couldn’t stand Christie was he felt she wasn’t interested enough in characterizations. To Chandler, Christie’s people were cardboard creations made up to enact a murder mystery, not the vivid, complex, multidimensional characters Chandler himself tried to create (and usually succeeded). He made an exception for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which Christie broke one of the traditional rules of mystery writing and made the narrator the murderer,but other than that he had nothing good to say about her. I agreed with him and it was not until I discovered Ruth Rendell that I realized a British woman who wrote mysteries had created fascinating multidimensional characters.

I also found it amazing that Ingrid Bergman won the third Academy Award of her career (and her first in the Supporting Actress category), when if anybody in this cast deserved an award it was not Bergman but Lauren Bacall (who’s a charter member of the list of great stars that never won the Oscar, along with Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Greta Garbo, John Garfield, Montgomery Clift and many others). Bacall marks every scene she’s in with grat power and authority. Murder on the Orient Express is also an all-star movie, and therefore a good one for drawing degrees-of-separation comparisons, including two women (Bergman and Bacall) who were important to Humphrey Bogart’s career (and in Bacall’s case in his personal life as well!), and it reunited two cast members from Hitchcock’s Psycho, Anthony Perkins and Martin Balsam.