Murder on the Orient Express

Nobody could ever accuse Agatha Christie of being a slacker. She managed to pump out 79 novels and collections of short stories, and also has more than a dozen plays to her credit. She has sold literally billions of copies of her books worldwide, and has only been outsold by the Bible and that Willy Shakespeare bloke. Very impressive!

Murder on the Orient Express is arguably her most well known tale to make it to the big screen, one of 33 that she penned featuring the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. With a cast so heavy with big names that it could quite easily have been an ego-nightmare on set, you'd think it would be absolutely wonderful - sadly I didn’t find it to be. Whilst I can see how it would have made a thrilling novel, cinematically it comes across rather talky and long-winded, and certainly isn’t the kind of mystery a Cluedo-obsessive would have much fun with, seeing as how the clues rarely seem to be presented in any way that somebody other than Poirot could make any sense of, so we're left to sit back and watch him plummet through them rather than really being given much of a chance to participate, unlike many better screen mysteries.

As it is a mystery I won't say much about the plot, basically oil-slick head Poirot (portrayed here rather finely by Albert Finney) hops the Orient Express (just in case you don’t know, it's a train) in Istanbul along with a hodgepodge of folk ranging from a Princess to an English Colonel, to a Hungarian Count and Countess to an American with a secretary and valet in tow. Soon after the latter approaches Poirot wanting protection, as he fears for his life. The diminutive detective passes on the offer, and needless to say soon after there's one stiff Yankee taking up a berth. After leaving Belgrade, the train gets trapped by a snowdrift, so Poirot takes the opportunity to endeavour to work out whodunit so that before any possible suspects can leave the scene it's all wrapped up in a nice, neat little package. Hmm, it's always the butler that did it anyway, isn't it?

"Has it occurred to you that there are too many clues in this room?"

The film was apparently made in a ratio of 2.35:1, and appears here in a ratio of 1.78:1. Whilst it doesn’t affect a rather talky film such as this dramatically, this is still inexcusable as far as I'm concerned, as I bought a DVD player to see movies how they were made, not how a studio deigns to butcher them - hence the lower video mark. It is at least anamorphically enhanced.

Visually it is actually a lot nicer than I was expecting, with rather pleasant, if slightly muted, colour saturation. Contrast is generally quite good, and the only real visual gremlins are not particularly intrusive black and white specks - it is after all 27 years old now.

The layer change occurs mid-scene, however being at a quiet point it actually went unnoticed on my first viewing - I actually had to go looking for it afterwards, which was a very pleasant change.

It's only in mono, and at times it can be a little difficult to decipher what is being said, however this is due more to some of the outrageous accents featured rather than through any great fault in the mix. Audio synch is fine throughout, and needless to say there's no surround action whatsoever.

Richard Rodney Bennett provided the score. It is certainly never intrusive, and tends to do its job quite well, the spooky bits in particular being quite brilliantly effective.

Well, this won’t take long. We get biographies and filmographies on most all the stars of the film, I say most as for some reason Jacqueline Bisset, Rachel Roberts and Richard Widmark have been excluded. They are reasonable interesting, and certainly reiterate the star-studded nature of the cast - if indeed it was necessary. There's also a brief but interesting biography of Agatha Christie herself.

Next is a fairly superfluous photo gallery, containing eight black and white stills, and ten colour ones.

Other than that there's a trailer, presented full screen it runs for just over three minutes and has quite reasonable video quality, however the sound is rather crackly. If you have a quick fiddle on the main menu you should also come across an Easter egg, which is simply a three-minute trailer for the simultaneous Christie release Evil Under the Sun.

Whilst featuring some undeniably brilliant acting from a stellar cast, notably from Finney and the wonderful Vanessa Redgrave (not that there are any personal biases towards tall redheads here or anything!), Murder on the Orient Express comes across as a bit too s-l-o-w and lacking anything to really hook an audience in too much. It isn't that it's bad by any means, just not particularly, well, engrossing. Normally loving a good little mystery, I found that even before the end I was disappointed, mainly as in a film such as this I'd rather be able to do my own detective work as it travels its course, rather than just be another passenger on the train. Still, perhaps too much Hitchcock has spoilt me?

My personal opinion of the film aside, as a disc it does have some major flaws, as outlined above. If you don’t mind the fact that it has been considerably cropped from its original cinematic aspect ratio then visually you should find it more than acceptable, and sonically it does its job reasonably well. There are no extras worthy of getting excited about, but at least a bit of effort went into putting something on the disc.

Gosh darn and botheration, I knew I should have grabbed Evil Under the Sun for review instead...