"I do not approve of murder."
Hello everyone!
So a little while back I sat down to watch the re-make of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, helmed by Kenneth Branagh and some other famous film stars.
Unfortunately, you may also know that one did NOT go off without a hitch.
In the spirit of trying to cleanse my taste buds from that foul thing, I ended up rewatching the David Suchet version with my friends (and then to top it off a couple of days ago, I also hunkered down for Death on the Nile, also with Suchet playing the titular role of the Belgian detective). Needless to say, the final consensus was that the Suchet apparition was much better than the Branagh one.
This does not necessarily have everything to do with the role of the sleuth, however, but with everything else happening around him, and how it's portrayed.
And while I will agree that, story-wise, there weren't that many differences between 2010 and 2017, the presentation of said story remains wildly opposite.
Back on the Orient Express we go!
I'll be linking my other review down at the bottom of the blog, although if you want to find more Hercule Poirot merch on here you can probably just type his name in the search engine up top. I've been known to indulge in my whodunit binging every once in a while.
Of course, as I've said, the story remains the same: Hercule Poirot finds himself traveling on the fabled Orient Express when a murder happens on the Calais coach, thus engaging his little grey cells into solving it. The results of his investigation remain one of the most brilliant, if not the most brilliant ever, whodunit endgame anyone has ever seen.
But let's chew right in, shall we?
As we all know, Poirot is actually solving a different case in the Middle East, having been called there by the general to help them out. He's in the middle of explaining his findings (and actually the story itself begins by the little hamster exploding into NO! YOU LIE TO POIROT!) when the accused (or falsely accused, or, well, he wasn't guilty but he lied to make himself seem guilty) pulls a gun and shoots himself in the head.
Boom. Talk about an introduction.
What follows is an interesting conversation Poirot has with an underly from the same military group as the deceased, explaining that there is always a way out which does NOT involve death, murder, suicide, or any of the above. There is, in the end, always choice.
Or so he says.
Realizing he needs to travel back to England without the benefit of sticking around Istanbul some more, Poirot runs into Monsieur Bouc, the director of the company which owns and manages the Orient Express, who not only recognizes his old chum but promises to get him a berth on what seems to be a full coach. He does what he promises - sticking poor Poirot with a young American chap called MacQueen (no Josh Gad here, sadly) - and the train is off!
Oh, I did almost forget - while wandering the streets, Poirot witnesses a man (Colonel Arbuthnot) and woman (Mary Debenham) apparently quite intimate, and all three of them see a woman stoned to death because she was pregnant with another man's child, and not her husband's.
Ouch.
On the train, however, Poirot observes that the Colonel and Miss Debenham appear to pretend not to know one another, and he decides to keep this observation to himself. We are also introduced to other characters in this upcoming drama: Ratchett, the American businessman whom MacQueen works for, as well as the English butler Masterman, Antonio Foscarelli who seems to sell cars (or at least he's some sort of salesman), Count Andrenyi and his wife, Swedish missionary Greta Ohlsson, Russian princess Dragomiroff and her servant Schmidt, American (annoying) native Mrs. Hubbard, Greek doctor Constantine, and conductor Michel.
We also witness Ratchett trying to make a move on Mary Debenham, her and Poirot having a difference of opinion about the poor woman's death in Istanbul, and Poirot being too polite to roll his eyes every time Bouc decides he needs to treat his friend to something.
Moved to his own own compartment the next night (and giving us an amusing vision of freezing outside during a stop the train makes), Poirot declines a job offer from Ratchett, and things spiral from there.
The night just seems to be both endless and full of complications, from Mrs. Hubbard to a weird woman in a kimono, to a shout by Ratchett and, finally, the train ploughing into a snow drift in the middle of nowhere Yugoslavia (thankfully no mountains this time!) so roughly that poor Michel lands face-first on the floor from his seat.
That's not all, however, because by next morning, a hysterical Bouc barges into Poirot's compartment: Ratchett has been stabbed to death!
He also takes the time to make a rather cracking observation: "Poirot, do you know where we are? This is Yugoslavia. This is not good place to have problem. This is the Wild West of the Balkans."
Agreeing to figure out just what happened to Ratchett, Poirot sets out to examine the body and the compartment, with the obligingly helpful Dr. Constantine who keeps trying to guess what might have happened and causes Poirot to both look sky-high in supplication and snap at the man to shut up, pay attention, and take notes: Ratchett was stabbed 12 times, with both hands, and both weakly and strongly. The killer did NOT exit out the open window, as suggested by the good doctor, because, you know, there ain't any footsteps out there in the snow. The handkerchief left behind gives Poirot no pleasure, but he's interested in something half-burned.
He's also interested in the passengers, and methodically begins interviewing them, starting with MacQueen and Masterman.
Both men admit that Ratchett had apparently been on the run, had received threatening letters, and was trying to atone for some crime or other, because he was carrying with him a hell of a lot of money. Couple that with the letters AISY ARMS which Poirot manages to lift (via very cool hat net method) from the burned piece of paper, and our master sleuth now knows the identity of the victim.
He was Cassetti, the man who had so infamously abducted Daisy Armstrong from her Long Island home, demanded a ransom of two hundred thousand dollars, but killed the poor child before the day was out. Her parents paid the ransom - but upon finding the body, Sonia Armstrong, Daisy's mother, went into premature labour with the second child she was carrying, and unfortunately both she and the child perished. This then led to Armstrong shooting himself, mad with grief.
But what followed was even worse, because Cassetti's mafia family managed to rig the trial and he walked, unpunished, while an innocent French maid, whom the police wrongly arrested, hung herself in her cell.
Now Poirot knows someone on the train has links to Cassetti - and MacQueen is the one who, quite rightly, points out that the killer is doomed: the little Belgian, for all his oddities, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Cassetti case and it's only a matter of time before all the little details spring back to him.
Then comes a procession of scenes in which David Suchet proves how brilliant he is as Poirot as he gives a 'you have GOT to be kidding me' look coupled with one which spells 'do you people think I'm an idiot?' as the other passengers all give each other alibis that seem water-tight.
And they would have been, as Poirot points out after finding the uniform of a conductor who had supposedly been in the coach at the time of the murder, but for the snow drift.
When he has them all gathered, in the semi-darkness (because power went out, too), Poirot then explains his theory: there are two solutions to the case.
In one, the assassin came onto the train at one of the stops, knifed Cassetti, grabbed the money and left, with the uniform planted as evidence, to be presented to the Yugoslavian police once the train stopped again and the body was discovered.
But Poirot has by now deduced that EVERYONE has been lying to him - which pisses him off to no end because, you do NOT lie to a detective, natch (also, Cassetti didn't speak foreign languages so him shouting in French is just baloney) - and that EVERYONE on the Calais coach has a connection to the murdered man. In fact, they all killed him, stabbing him one by one, as twelve members of a self-appointed jury.
And who were they? Princess Dragomiroff, godmother to Sonia Armstrong; her maid Schmidt, former Armstrong cook; Michel, father of the poor French maid; Foscarelli, the chauffeur; MacQueen, the son of the prosecutor who was threatened with his son's death if he didn't throw the Cassetti trial; Masterman, who'd served with Armstrong and Arbuthnot in the war; Arbuthnot, Armstrong's best friend; Mary Debenham, the governess who tried to stop the abduction but was left partly paralysed; Greta Ohlsson, the nurse; Count Andrenyi, husband to Sonia Armstrong's younger sister, Helena; Dr. Constantine, who'd been the family doctor; and finally Mrs. Hubbard, or better yet Linda Arden, mother of Sonia and Helena.
And despite the fact that Princess Dragomiroff asks Poirot to hand her over to the police at Brod, Poirot is adamant that all of them should be judged for the murder - because, in his own words, when justice falls, you pick it up and hold it even higher. They were not called to do God's work - to make themselves into God. So he asks Bouc - despite Bouc's protestations that they're good people - to lock them into the dining car, where Arbuthnot says he will NOT be seen, so he'll just shoot Bouc and Poirot both.
Thankfully this doesn't happen, and by the time the Yugoslavian police arrive, and Poirot and Mary Debenham have a little chat about how she was so disturbed over the people taking the law into their own hands against the woman in Istanbul but she had no such compulsion for herself, Poirot presents the theory of the conductor.
And walks away knowing he let twelve murderers go free.
The emotional impact of this particular episode in the Poirot series is much better presented in this version than in the 2017 one; the struggles all of the twelve faced, and Poirot himself had to go through, to throw his own morals to the wind so that this Wild West justice prevailed, are haunting. Also, it's much easier to keep track of the details here, of keeping up with Poirot (who does NOT dash about, much less parade on top of the train) and following his deductions, and giving each character the recognition he or she deserves (I mean Foscarelli even got a threat in, the industrious capo).
I think a lot of this also has to do with the setting, the lights and the music, all much darker and more evocative than in Branagh's version.
And of course, actually seeing a serious Poirot on screen helps, too.
xx
*poster image and video not mine, screencaps by me
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