| Murder on the Orient Express | |
| Director: | Sidney Lumet |
| Producer: | John Brabourne Richard Goodwin |
| Screenplay: | Paul Dehn |
| Starring: |
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| Music: | Richard Rodney Bennett |
| Cinematography: | Geoffrey Unsworth |
| Editing: | Anne V. Coates |
| Studio: | G.W. Films Limited EMI Films |
| Distributor: | Anglo-EMI Film Distributors |
| Runtime: | 128 minutes[1] |
| Country: | United Kingdom[2] |
| Language: | English |
| Gross: | $37.7 million[3] |
Murder on the Orient Express is a 1974 British mystery film directed by Sidney Lumet, produced by John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, and based on the 1934 novel of the same name by Agatha Christie.
The film features the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney), who is asked to investigate the murder of an American business tycoon aboard the Orient Express train. The suspects are portrayed by an all-star cast, including Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York, Rachel Roberts, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Perkins, Richard Widmark and Wendy Hiller. The screenplay is by Paul Dehn.
The film was a commercial and critical success. Bergman won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the film received five other nominations at the 47th Academy Awards: Best Actor (Finney), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Costume Design.
In 1930, toddler Daisy Armstrong, daughter of British Army Colonel Hamish Armstrong and his wife Sonia, is kidnapped and murdered.
In December 1935, Hercule Poirot travels from Istanbul to London on the Orient Express. Other passengers include American socialite Harriet Hubbard; English governess Mary Debenham; Swedish missionary Greta Ohlsson; American businessman Samuel Ratchett, with his secretary Hector McQueen and English valet Edward Beddoes; car salesman Antonio Foscarelli; elderly Russian Princess Natalia Dragomiroff and her German maid Hildegarde Schmidt; Hungarian Count Rudolf Andrenyi and his wife Elena; British Army Colonel John Arbuthnott; and American theatrical agent Cyrus B. Hardman. Signor Bianchi, a director of the Wagons-Lits company, shares a coach with physician Dr. Stavros Constantine.
Ratchett requests to hire Poirot as bodyguard as he has received death threats; Poirot declines. A snowdrift in Yugoslavia strands the train. During the night, Poirot is awakened by a moan from Ratchett's compartment. Conductor Pierre Michel is told through the door it was just a nightmare. Ratchett is dead the next morning; drugged and stabbed twelve times.
Poirot finds a charred letter fragment revealing Ratchett's true identity: American gangster Lanfranco Cassetti who, with an accomplice, had carried out Daisy's kidnapping and murder. Cassetti had betrayed his accomplice and fled with the ransom money. Mrs. Armstrong then died giving birth to a stillborn baby, and Colonel Armstrong committed suicide. The French maidservant Paulette, suspected of complicity in the kidnapping, also committed suicide before being found innocent. Bianchi feels there is justice in Cassetti's death.
Poirot finds Cassetti's broken watch showing 01:15, and concludes that Cassetti was murdered at that time when the moaning was heard. Hubbard says she found a Wagon-Lit conductor's button in her compartment and a bloodied knife in her makeup bag. Foscarelli says he knew Cassetti was "Mafioso", and theorises that he was killed in a Mafia feud.
Interviewing the passengers individually, Poirot learns McQueen is the son of the District Attorney from the kidnapping case and knew Mrs. Armstrong; Beddoes was a British Army batman; Greta Ohlsson has been to America; Countess Andrenyi's maiden name is Grünwald (German for "Greenwood", Mrs. Armstrong's maiden name); Conductor Pierre's daughter died five years earlier of scarlet fever; Colonel Arbuthnott and Miss Debenham will marry once he has divorced his philandering wife; and Princess Dragomiroff was Sonia's godmother. He also learns that the Armstrong household had a butler, a secretary, a cook, a chauffeur, and a nursemaid. Poirot tricks Schmidt into revealing she had been a cook. Foscarelli denies having been a chauffeur, while Hardman claims to actually be Cassetti's bodyguard.
Poirot assembles the suspects and describes two solutions to the murder: the first that Cassetti's murder was a Mafia revenge killing - someone disguised as a Wagon-Lit conductor entered the train at Belgrade and later stabbed Cassetti, discarded the dagger in Hubbard's makeup bag, then escaped when the train was stopped by the snowdrift. Bianchi and Constantine reject this scenario as absurd, but Poirot says they might reconsider that opinion.
The second solution links together all the suspects. In addition to the incriminating revelations Poirot extracted from Hardman, McQueen, Schmidt, and the Princess, Poirot deduces that Countess Elena is Mrs. Armstrong's younger sister, Helena; Mary Debenham was the Armstrongs' secretary; Beddoes was the Armstrongs' butler; Ohlsson was Daisy's nursemaid; Arbuthnott was Colonel Armstrong's close friend; Foscarelli was their chauffeur; Pierre was Paulette's father; and that Hardman was not Cassetti's bodyguard, as Ratchett had tried to hire Poirot for that job. He was actually a former policeman who had fallen in love with Paulette Michel. Hubbard is revealed to be Linda Arden, mother of Sonia Armstrong and Helena Andrenyi, and the organiser of this "extraordinary revenge". McQueen drugged Cassetti, allowing the conspirators to execute him jointly, each with a stab to the chest totalling 12, the Andrenyis stabbing Cassetti together. They killed Cassetti at 02:00 hours while Poirot was asleep. The moan and broken watch were to convince Poirot that the murder occurred at a time when the suspects had alibis.
Poirot asks Bianchi to choose one solution before the train is freed from the snowdrift, saying the Yugoslav police would probably prefer the simpler first solution of the Mafia feud. Bianchi chooses the first scenario. Constantine and Poirot concur, although Poirot struggles with his conscience. The train resumes its journey.
Dame Agatha Christie had been quite displeased with some film adaptations of her works made in the 1960s, and accordingly was unwilling to sell any more film rights. When Nat Cohen, chairman of EMI Films, and producer John Brabourne attempted to get her approval for this film, they felt it necessary to have Lord Mountbatten of Burma (of the British royal family and also Brabourne's father-in-law) help them broach the subject. In the end, according to Christie's husband, Sir Max Mallowan, "Agatha herself has always been allergic to the adaptation of her books by the cinema, but was persuaded to give a rather grudging appreciation to this one." According to one report, Christie gave approval because she liked the previous films of the producers, Romeo and Juliet and Tales of Beatrix Potter.[4]
Christie's biographer Gwen Robyns quoted her as saying, "It was well made except for one mistake. It was Albert Finney, as my detective Hercule Poirot. I wrote that he had the finest mustache in England — but he didn't in the film. I thought that a pity—why shouldn't he?"[5]
Cast members eagerly accepted upon first being approached. Lumet went to Sean Connery first, who admitted that he had been "stupidly flattered" by Lumet saying that if you get the biggest star, the rest will come along. Bergman was initially offered the role of Princess Dragomiroff, but instead requested to play Greta Ohlsson. Lumet said:
Bergman won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the portrayal.
The entire budget was provided by EMI. The cost of the cast came to £554,100.[6]
Unsworth shot the film with Panavision cameras. Interiors were filmed at Elstree Studios. Exterior shooting was mostly done in France in 1973, with a railway workshop near Paris standing in for Istanbul station. The scenes of the train proceeding through Central Europe were filmed in the Jura Mountains on the then-recently-closed railway line from Pontarlier to Gilley, with the scenes of the train stuck in snow being filmed in a cutting near Montbenoît.[7] There were concerns about a lack of snow in the weeks preceding the scheduled shooting of the snowbound train, and plans were made to truck in large quantities of snow at considerable expense. However, heavy snowfall the night before the shooting made the extra snow unnecessary—just as well, as the snow-laden backup trucks had themselves become stuck in the snow.[8]
Richard Rodney Bennett's Orient Express theme has been reworked into an orchestral suite and performed and recorded several times. It was performed on the original soundtrack album by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden under Marcus Dods. The piano soloist was the composer himself.
Murder on the Orient Express was released theatrically in the UK on 24 November 1974. The film was a success at the box office, given its tight budget of $1.4 million,[9] earning $36 million in North America,[9] [10] making it the 11th highest-grossing film of 1974. Nat Cohen claimed it was the first film completely financed by a British company to make the top of the weekly US box office charts in Variety.[11]
On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 89% based on 44 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Murder, intrigue, and a star-studded cast make this stylish production of Murder on the Orient Express one of the best Agatha Christie adaptations to see the silver screen."[12] On Metacritic it has a weighted average score of 63 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[13]
Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four, writing that it "provides a good time, high style, a loving salute to an earlier period of filmmaking".[14] The New York Timess chief critic of the era, Vincent Canby, wrote
[...] had Dame Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express been made into a movie 40 years ago (when it was published here as Murder on the Calais Coach), it would have been photographed in black-and-white on a back lot in Burbank or Culver City, with one or two stars and a dozen character actors and studio contract players. Its running time would have been around 67 minutes and it could have been a very respectable B-picture. Murder on the Orient Express wasn't made into a movie 40 years ago, and after you see the Sidney Lumet production that opened yesterday at the Coronet, you may be both surprised and glad it wasn't. An earlier adaptation could have interfered with plans to produce this terrifically entertaining super-valentine to a kind of whodunit that may well be one of the last fixed points in our inflationary universe.[15]
Christie, who died fourteen months after the release of the film, stated that Murder on the Orient Express and Witness for the Prosecution were the only movie adaptations of her books that she liked although she expressed disappointment with Poirot (Finney)'s moustache, which was far from the fabulous hirsute creation she had detailed in her mysteries.[4]