Murder on the Orient Express (1974) Movie Review & Film summary, Cast

It’s peculiar that all the high-gloss, big-name casting, and sense of high drama has been expended on what amounts to a bunch of people chatting on a train. Generally I have no fondness for the whodunnit genre, and to a great extent MotOE embodies why – the story is tension-free, the set-up mechanical, the situation absurd. Add the fact this film kicked off a series of crummy Christie adaptations, most starring an entirely miscast Peter Ustinov, and I ought to loathe this film. But it’s entertaining, largely thanks to Sidney Lumet’s crisp, stylish direction. An apparently peculiar project for him when he was deep in the midst of his golden run of the ’70s, it isn’t really – it plays into his hands as another chance to show off his tremendous skill at herding a large cast of idiosyncratic actors in sketchily written roles, and his true mastery of the crime drama, both exemplified by his debut film, 12 Angry Men. Lumet manages to bring a bit of noir tautness, especially in the eerie opening, to a narrative that would otherwise be a fatal mixture of period lark and minor intellectual exercise. That, and Albert Finney’s having a ball playing Poirot as a brilliant, excitable but slightly socially inept nerd, gives the film an energetic heart.