Original subtitles

(TRAIN WHISTLES)

(CONDUCTOR SPEAKS ITALIAN)

Grazie, Pierre. I understand that you are full up.

It's unbelievable, signore.

All the world likes to travel tonight.

Nonetheless, you must find room for Monsieur Poirot, here.

Monsieur Hercule Poirot?

In a cramped but luxurious train carriage,

snowbound between Istanbul and Calais,

twelve suspects have gathered to hear an irascible little Belgian man

reveal who committed murder.

His hair pomaded to the shine of his patent leather shoes,

his face jowly with late middle age.

How he loves the sound of his own voice.

(SHUFFLING)

And do you think Finney is the definitive Poirot?

I think yes, Finney is the definitive Poirot

in that he perfectly calibrates

the humour and the seriousness of his role

with a real sense of kind of moral backbone.

And he was supposed to take up the role again

in Death On The Nile in 1978,

and didn't in the end. He was replaced by Peter Ustinov.

Something is poetic about being a one off, isn't it?

Just the one perfect moment. Absolutely.

And Poirot is, you know, his Poirot specifically,

is up there with sort of Humphrey Bogart,

Sam Spade, or Philip Marlowe,

one of those kind of quintessential cinematic detectives.

(GRAND ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

(TRAIN WHISTLING)

POIROT: In three days, all these people, these total strangers

meet in a single train whose engine controls their destiny.

BIANCHI: Oh, yes, I know. We are both envious of the husband, eh?

Is, uh...

is the husband as British as his tweeds?

Oh, heaven forbid, he's a hot-blooded Hungarian.

If you but look at his wife, he will cease to be a diplomat.

Thank God we are not young. (BOTH CHUCKLE)

Beneath the remarkable makeup

lies the 37-year-old British actor Albert Finney,

having the time of his life.

With wit and eloquence, and no little flamboyance,

he reveals a plot of complexity and cunning.

An attempt not only to perpetrate murder,

but then outwit the great detective Hercule Poirot.

For this is the gripping climax

to the legendary whodunnit, Murder On The Orient Express,

when the truth will out.

NEIL: Murder on the Orient Express,

the 1974 version of the film,

is probably the best version

of any Agatha Christie novel.

There is a variety of reasons for this.

It is first of all, beautifully cast.

It is beautifully designed.

It is directed absolutely impeccably,

and it does everything that the book does, but more.

Finney is surrounded by one of the greatest casts ever assembled.

Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman,

Lauren Bacall, Vanessa Redgrave,

Anthony Perkins, John Gielgud,

Jacqueline Bisset, Michael York,

Wendy Hiller, Rachel Roberts.

Jean-Pierre Cassel, Denis Quilley,

Colin Blakely, Martin Balsam,

with Richard Widmark as the victim.

There also happened to be a peculiar

but brilliant little man behind the camera -

the unconventional choice of Sidney Lumet,

the New York director better known for his gritty,

street-wise psychodramas

like 12 Angry Men and Serpico.

In his hands, this talky, starry,

intricately plotted thriller,

a huge hit in 1974,

became still the definitive Agatha Christie adaptation.

It elevated the whodunnit

to an exhilarating exploration of character.

What did you do on Murder On The Orient Express?

Well I was what, in those days, was called continuity,

but today it's called script supervisor.

I actually had worked for the director.

He is one of the most efficient directors I've ever worked with.

He was so disciplined,

he really knew, he planned everything.

You rehearsed for a week or two,

depending on the film.

You could ask, or I should say, the actors could ask,

any question they liked about their characters.

He had written sort of backstories for them.

But once that was all hammered out

in the rehearsal period...

..he would not tolerate them coming up and saying,

'What is my character thinking?' or, 'What should I be doing?'

or could I do this or that?

That was all sorted out during the rehearsal period.

So what do you make of Sidney Lumet?

He seems a very unconventional choice to direct Agatha Christie.

Well, on one hand you have this kind of quintessentially English writer,

and someone who is often dealing with European aristocracy,

and the upper crust of the old world.

And then you have this incredibly New York

kind of street director, Sidney Lumet,

who started out in TV doing live television in the 1950s,

but, you know, went on to make films like 12 Angry Men,

and, of course, Serpico.

So he had this reputation

for being gritty and realistic,

and really absolutely nothing to do with this very stylised

and plush world of old Europe.

And this very English world

that Agatha Christie presented in her novels.

I think one of the reasons that Lumet

works so well with this film

is because he understood

that, quite apart from being, you know,

the greatest selling author of all time,

Agatha Christie was also

the greatest female playwright of all time.

She wanted to be a playwright and spent a lot of time

not getting plays on,

but when she hit, she hit big.

And she understood the idea

of transferring theatrical devices

into her novels and vice versa.

I think that's what makes Sidney Lumet in particular,

a wonderfully appropriate director for this.

He came out of theatre himself.

Many of his films are based on original stage plays.

Congratulations on this very real achievement.

How do you feel about having the longest run

ever in the land of the theatre?

Well naturally, I think it's wonderful.

Hardly believe it.Well, I think most people think it's wonderful.

It's certainly the longest run of any of your plays.

Do you think, yourself, that it's the best?

Well, I don't think an author can tell, themselves, do you?

Did you think, yourself, when you wrote this

that it was a sure-fire winner?

No, I never think that. (CHUCKLES)

You don't like your own plays even when you see them produced?

Ah, when I see them produced, it's better.In what way?

Well, I mean when you've just finished writing them,

of course, you think they're terrible. The same with books.

Do you prefer writing plays or books?

Oh, plays every time. Why?Much more fun.

To see them all coming to life? No, just more fun to write.

Have you ever met a real criminal?

Ah, maybe.

But I don't know if so.

Why are you so fascinated by crime?

I don't know that I'm very fascinated by it.

I just began writing about it

and then one continues, doesn't one, usually?

I've always liked detective stories.

You like other people too? Mmm, always liked them, yes.

Can you tell me, what about your future?

Have you a play on the stocks at the moment

that might run as long as The Mousetrap?

Ah, one would never like to say that.

(LAUGHS) Thank you very much.

Agatha Christie was and is hugely important.

The best-selling novelist of all time.

But the years between the wars

were a golden age of detective fiction,

and most of the writers were women.

Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey,

Margery Allingham.

But where Agatha Christie stands out

is, well, partly her sheer prolific quality.

What, 33 novels on Poirot alone?

And maybe 50 short stories, a play.

I think 66 novels in all.

Dorothy Sayers wrote about a dozen.

But clearly she,

even more than her contemporaries,

hit something in the zeitgeist.

Because in the years

after the First World War,

almost every household had lost someone.

Death needed to have the sting taken out of it,

and that's what the classic detective stories did.

Look at this one, Murder On The Orient Express.

Does anyone care about the man who's killed?

No. That's what it tends to be.

It tends to be a puzzle

without too much inconvenient,

painful emotion in it.

POIROT: You are in danger.My life has been threatened, Mr Poirot.

My secretary can show you two letters on file.

And I...

can show you this.

I sleep on it.

Mr Poirot...

..$5,000.

No?

$10,000? (TRAIN BELL RINGS)

$15,000?

Mr Ratchett, I have made enough money

to satisfy both my needs and my caprices.

I take only such cases now as interests me and to be frank,

my interest in your case is, uh...

dwindling.

(TRAIN WHISTLES)

(TRAIN ANNOUNCER SPEAKING FRENCH)

NEWSREEL: Paris has six railway stations,

the busiest of which is the Gare de Lyon.

The Orient Express pulls out at 8:20 every night.

Only one car will go the entire route to Istanbul.

Along with the diplomats, the couriers, and their secret pouches,

reporter Kendrick rode in the Istanbul car.

Producer John Brabourne was visiting the Kremlin

with his daughter in the early 70s, queuing for Lenin's tomb.

She was so engrossed in her book,

she didn't pay the slightest bit of attention to their surroundings.

He asked her what she was reading.

It was Murder On The Orient Express.

Brabourne had impressive credentials.

He was a Baron, Lord Mountbatten's son-in-law,

and cousin to the Queen.

As a film producer, he veered towards literary subjects.

He would produce Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet,

as well as the Tales of Beatrix Potter,

but was warned that Agatha Christie

had grown very protective over her books.

The truth was, Agatha Christie had grown weary

of the poor adaptations of her work,

especially on screen.

Dating back as far as 1928

with The Passing Of Mr Quin,

films based on her books were mostly unsatisfactory.

She thought that Margaret Rutherford

had turned Miss Marple into a lovable buffoon.

With the exception of Billy Wilder's

Witness For The Prosecution,

no one had got it right.

So what are your recollections of John Brabourne,

who was Lord Brabourne, I believe,

who was the producer of the film, who was the son-in-law

of Lord Mountbatten, have I got that right?

So he was quite a grand person to be producing the film.

Oh, yes, John Brabourne,

and Richard Goodwin was his partner.

He was co-producer with him.

Lord Brabourne was the one

who brought Prince Charles to the set, and...

..towards the end, his youngest brother Edward came

after school to see the set.

But he called himself John Brabourne to everybody,

we didn't call him Lord Brabourne.

He was actually a very nice man.

And had been sort of working in films for...

quite a long time.

What do you know of Agatha Christie's rather dislike

for the adaptations of her work?

Christie was said to be, by her husband,

allergic to the screen adaptations of her work.

She never really liked any of them, she was highly critical

of their casting and so forth.

But she did really like Billy Wilder's

Witness For The Prosecution.

So you could say she had pretty good taste where that was concerned.

Agatha Christie was very reluctant

to have any more of her books adapted for the screen,

because she had suffered in the past.

The first adaptation, of course, was a great one -

1957 Witness For The Prosecution.

Billy Wilder and Marlene Dietrich,

Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton.

Great. But then...

..she made a deal which she bitterly regretted with MGM.

She needed the money, you wouldn't think of that

for such a staggeringly successful writer,

but she had got into a tax difficulty,

which plagued her for many, many years.

So she signed a deal with MGM,

who cast Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple.

Agatha personally liked

and admired Margaret Rutherford,

dedicated a novel to her, in fact.

But this series of, I think, four films,

got weirder and weirder.

She was even more upset when MGM

then turned their attention to Poirot.

They cast Tony Randall as Poirot.

The ABC Murders

became the Alphabet Murders on screen.

But they had Poirot

in a bowling alley,

making with the bowls.

They were trying,

I think, to answer the success

of the Inspector Clouseau movies,

to make him a semi-comic

action hero, almost.

And they actually had Miss Marple

and Hercule Poirot meeting for a moment.

And needless to say,

Agatha was even more distressed about this.

She swore never again,

no more film adaptations.

But the makers of The Orient Express

persuaded her to change her mind.

Through his august father-in-law,

Brabourne was granted a rare audience with the reclusive author.

He convinced her that they would do justice to her novel,

set on the famous train.

Lumet understood because he came out of theatre,

and he understood different mediums when he was directing.

He'd been in television.

And he was attracted by the idea of turning

what is basically a static piece of work,

into a big cinema experience.

Sidney Lumet was looking to do something lighter.

He wanted to make a souffle, he said,

and here was the perfect recipe.

One that took him far from New York,

and promised the possibility of working with his idols,

and had a brilliantly structured plot.

But once he was shooting,

he was confronted by a fascinating challenge -

to tell a story trapped within the confines of a train.

And it is also a period piece set in 1935.

Lumet's metier is contemporary thrillers,

social justice on the hard-hitting streets of New York.

But on closer inspection, it makes perfect sense.

The carriage is a jury room.

There are distinct echoes of 12 Angry Men,

and courtroom thrillers like Serpico,

where one man pursues the truth.

Lumet is so good with the dynamics

of personality in confined spaces,

thriving where the only tool to hand is performance.

In a sense, when you look at Murder On The Orient Express,

it's very similar to 12 Angry Men.

There are 12 suspects, they are confined to one space,

and there is one man pursuing the truth.

So you imagine, actually, while Sidney Lumet said

he wanted to do something lighter and more melodramatic,

he may have seen a quintessential Sidney Lumet film in there.

Yeah, there are certainly parallels to be drawn between these two films,

and I think Lumet's interest in law and order

and the justice system, in America usually,

and also in the kind of individual weight of moral responsibility...

all of these things appear in these life or death stories,

these whodunnits that Agatha Christie wrote.

And in Murder On The Orient Express, the hero, Poirot,

is ultimately left with a decision to make,

a moral decision to make, about...

what's right and what's wrong, and who should be...

who should be seen as innocent and who should be seen as guilty.

Adapted by Paul Dehn,

with an uncredited rewrite by Anthony Shaffer,

the story is well-known.

With Poirot, a late and unexpected passenger,

the Orient Express begins to wend its way across Europe.

The next morning, the unlikeable business man, Ratchett,

played with nervy malevolence by Richard Widmark,

is found stabbed to death.

Poirot's senses alerted, his mind ticking,

he leaps upon the case.

A murder perpetrated beneath his very nose.

The fallacy about Agatha Christie

is that she wrote cosy mysteries

all set in vicarages in Sussex or Kent.

Of course, she did some of those,

but, in fact, she had a much broader canvas.

She was very, very well travelled.

I mean, she travelled on the Orient Express,

she'd spent quite a lot of time in Egypt as a child.

Her second husband was an archaeologist.

So she knew the world, I mean, and she absorbed it,

and she was fascinated by other cultures.

And many of her books

are in fact set on a, you know,

they're set on a much broader international scale

than I think we tend to think of.

At the heart of Agatha Christie's book,

there's a very American story.

All the evidence, all the what's going on behind the murder,

is about an up-state New York family.

That's what you need to know going in.

And it's not so far away from the world of Sidney Lumet.

And Agatha Christie actually based her book

partly on the story of the Lindbergh kidnappings

in the early 1930s, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

So there is that American... very famous American news story

about celebrity and violence

in, you know, the heart of that novel.

So there's something interesting about the fact

that Lumet, who is so fascinated by these themes,

is returning to this story.

Backed by EMI films,

this is a prestige British picture in the Korda mould.

Literary, with a period setting,

and laden with stars.

But it is very much a Lumet picture too,

drawing close to its characters,

and enjoying the moral uncertainty of the story.

Did the victim have it coming?

It is a study in class, family,

conspiracy, and vengeance.

(LOCK CLICKS) The chain.

Ah, touch nothing!

Where are Signor Bianchi and the Greek doctor?

In the dining car, Monsieur.

Fetch them at once.

NEWSREEL: The train moves across the Italian countryside

toward the Adriatic and Trieste.

The diners lose money, but are run to continue the tradition.

Every meal except breakfast includes veal.

Here, 20 hours from Paris, the Orient Express

ceases being just a train, and becomes a symbol as well.

Lumet was certain that if he landed one superstar,

the rest would surely follow.

So he approached his friend Sean Connery first.

They had made two complex thrillers together.

Connery loved the idea.

It was another Lumet challenge,

to make an impression with little screen time.

One by one, they fell into place,

delighted by this ingenious story.

Lumet's sole disappointment

is that he failed to lure Marlene Dietrich out of retirement.

(MAN SINGS INDISTINCTLY) (DOG BARKS)

Welcome, Colonel Arbu...

Arbu... Arbut...

Arbuthnot.

MAN: (ON PA) The bus for Esperin will shortly depart

for Istanbul Sirkeci station.

You get a real sense of international travel,

what it must have been like at that time in Istanbul Station,

which is all crowded with all kinds of different people.

And through the sort of steam and the haze

come these various fantastical characters,

dressed absolutely brilliantly,

to board the first class compartments.

In between that, you see this wonderful food

that's been sort of given up to the thing.

And all being tested, you know, an oyster is opened.

(SMACKS LIPS) Yes, OK, they're good. The wine is looked at.

He looks at the bottle. Hmm, right vintage, yes.

And all these tiny details sort of build up

to the idea that you're going on an amazing journey

in the company of amazing people.

Then he pans right back

to the train itself and the locomotive,

which, of course, is a character in itself.

It's a magnificent sort of machine.

All this is done in darkness. Actually, it's quite dark.

And there's a lot of clatter,

and a little bit of music.

But when everybody is on board

and when the train is ready to go off,

what happens is that the lights

on the headlights of the train come blazing forth.

(GRAND ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

(STEAM HISSES)

The music rises to the crescendo,

and what you're listening to is an overture

to a huge musical spectacle.

This is like an MGM film, or a piece of theatre,

which is what you are going to get on film.

And out it goes into the darkness,

and the last thing you hear

is the long, mournful whistle,

which sounds exactly like a scream.

(TRAIN WHISTLES)It is one of the most brilliant openings

of a film of that kind that I think I've ever seen. Fabulous.

SARAH: Well, Sidney Lumet, in a way,

he brought the best of Hollywood to England.

He didn't want to be corralled

into the Hollywood model.

But from the start, he was determined

that this wouldn't be a little, cute,

cosy adaptation of Agatha Christie.

That this would be socking,

full-out glamour, and fun,

and that's what he did.

The moment I see that first

is when Mrs Hubbard, the Lauren Bacall character,

arrives in the station

wearing this amazing concoction.

Lumet himself said, quite rightly,

that no-one has ever got on a train dressed like that

to start a long journey, but who cares?

These weren't ordinary dresses, these were costumes.

Glamorous. And that's glamour to the max.

This was the first Agatha Christie adaptation

to have its list of suspects

played by a suite of greats...

..to have her already-grand characters

loaded with superstar baggage.

That Bacall's character is a little like Bacall,

or that Bergman's is rather like Bergman,

is entirely deliberate.

The film honours its starts,

even as it accuses them of murder.

When you've got stars of that magnitude, you know,

and you have some really not just big stars,

but really, really fine actors, all sort of having

more or less equal time and jostling for position.

There was no jostling for position because they trusted Sidney

in order to be able to make it all work.

The lovely thing was that he also managed

to sort of use their personas,

or their profiles,

within the characters that they were playing.

So, for example, Anthony Perkins

pops up as McQueen,

the sort of assistant to Richard Widmark.

And he's a very nervous man. He's very nervous, he's twitchy.

He has a mother fixation.

Of course, the minute you hear that,

you realise that you're watching sort of Norman Bates,

or Norman Bates's sort of second cousin down the line.

And it gives you a connection to his earlier performances,

which... it doesn't distract from the character,

it actually makes it somehow more fully rounded

because you've got a history, or a potential history,

behind the character you're watching on the screen.

There's a really fascinating idea, I think,

in Murder On The Orient Express,

and I think Lumet's very good with it.

Is that all these wonderful actors

are playing a part

that is playing a part, if you understand me.

They are all deceiving, certainly, Poirot.

So what we see on the screen isn't necessarily their character.

Their character is sort of hidden within the performance

they are giving within the film.

And it's a sort of fantastically layered idea.

I think it's something that he probably got to relish in.

You know, coming off the back of a film like Serpico,

which was ripped from the headlines,

where you're talking about real people and, you know,

where Frank Serpico, the main character there,

was somebody that Al Pacino was spending time with to learn about.

You get a lot more free rein with a literary adaptation like this,

and particularly because you have such big characters.

But you also manage to get these actors

who are kind of playing with their own personas.

So Ingrid Bergman, who is playing

this very sort of meek, pious missionary.

I mean, 'Is she actually so pious?' is the question.

And of course, in Ingrid Bergman's own life, she was often cast

in parts like that early in her career, in things like

The Bells Of St Mary's, for instance.

And then her infamous affair

with the Italian film director Roberto Rossellini

sort of shattered her reputation in America,

and caused a great scandal. And so she wasn't nearly

as sort of saintly as she appeared on the screen.

And that, all of that, is feeding back into the persona

and the layers of persona that you get.

What is it that is so pleasurable about Murder On The Orient Express?

It is that it's entirely about performance.

It works as an ensemble of very different actors and styles,

like an expensive chocolate box.

Compare Bacall's feisty American divorcee -

almost a self-parody -

with Connery's simmering anger

as a dyed-in-the-wool British officer.

But it also works as a one-man show -

Finney's delectable take on Poirot.

Mr Ratchett has been frontally stabbed...

..ten, eleven, twelve times.

Oh, dear.Mon pauvre, if you must go woop-woop,

please go woop-woop not to windward, but to leeward.

Help him, Pierre.

There had been Poirots on stage and film,

including Charles Laughton, Austin Trevor and Tony Randall.

None had come close to Agatha Christie's

fastidious Belgian detective.

When both Alec Guinness and Paul Scofield declined the role,

Lumet turned to Albert Finney.

He was too young,

but Lumet knew what a precise actor Finney was.

Finney was certain that he wanted

to make Poirot not necessarily likeable.

He is arrogant, disdainful, eccentric.

He transforms from irritation

to almost childish delight

when the case unfurls before him.

So tell me something about his performance

and watching him take on the character. How did he work?

Well, it's hard to know how somebody works.

I mean, he had discussed his part

at great lengths, I'm sure, with Sidney,

and they had come to an agreement

as to how he was going to play it.

And you know, again,

he just got on with it.

We didn't ever have actors saying

'I don't like this line,' or 'I don't want to do it this way.'

A two-week rehearsal was vital for Lumet,

to bring his cast together and get them singing to his tune.

Also, to get all their questions out the way.

Once they were shooting, he would be obsessed

with the case's Poirot.

He was amazed to find how the legends

were nervous meeting one another.

He had to remind them they were all actors.

Time to knuckle down.

Well, can't you tap the telephone wires?Fire a rocket or something?

BIANCHI: This is not a ship, madam. Where are we?

We are between Vinkovci and Brod.

In what country? In Yugoslavia.

The Balkans. What else can you expect?

Snow is God's will and always for the best.

Yeah, but h-h-how long do you think

before we start getting out of here? As soon as the station master

perceives that we do not arrive on time, he will send-(CLATTERING)

What was the rehearsal like, and gathering together

all these legends of film?

Well, they were all very supportive of each other,

and what you did with Sidney

was to read around the table.

They would all read their parts, and I'd sometimes

have to read the scene descriptions.

We probably did that twice,

and then he rehearsed

every scene in the film,

because the sets were marked out,

because we didn't have them built or anything.

So they rehearsed it that way

and so they knew exactly what they were doing

when it came to shooting it. Yeah.

Observe, memorise. You are my only witnesses!

A-I-S-Y A-R-M-S. BIANCHI: What does that mean?

It means...

we know the true identity of Mr Ratchett...

..and why he had to leave America.

(HUMS, SINGS INDISTINCTLY)

(FOOTSTEPS, OBJECTS CLATTER)

(HUMS, SINGS INDISTINCTLY)

(CHUCKLES)

(LAUGHS)

The book presents an interesting cinematic challenge.

Everything is seen or heard from Poirot's perspective.

Of course, he arrives at the scene of the crime

before it has been committed.

The night of the murder is depicted

in a series of glimpses.

Distant voices, knocks at a door,

clues that seem too obvious.

Once the body is discovered,

the story evolves into a series

of interrogations with the suspects,

these delicious vignettes

where each actor gets a chance to shine.

The interiors of the train were built at Elstree Studios.

It was a film consciously restricted in terms of space.

Apart from the early scenes in Istanbul,

the arrivals of the passengers and exteriors of the train,

the story is entirely set within the bounds

of two carriages of the sumptuous Orient Express.

Lumet keeps his cast

confined to the train.

Scenes are shot often over

or around Poirot,

as if the camera is one step behind his investigation.

It's really a feat

of several different strands, I guess, of Lumet's talent,

and it shows how many different talents he had in that.

He started out working in confined spaces

in that he was often working on live television,

one-set plays in cramped studios.

So something which was born of necessity,

which is to say that he could work really well in confined spaces,

and figure out ways to put the camera

in the places they needed to be,

and often with really teeming,

complex amounts of things going on

within those shots as well.

But that thing that was born of necessity

kind of became a signature for him.

And he continues to do that in so many others of his films,

even as the budgets increase.

And with Murder On The Orient Express,

of course, so much of it takes place

in this confined area of the train

and the compartments of that train.

And on top of that, of course, the train is snowbound, it's trapped.

So it gives a real claustrophobic air.

And there's a wonderful...

sort of sense of use of design of the train itself.

And it's very unusual, you know,

he doesn't shoot the train in a cliched way.

He uses these kind of strange lights.

He makes it almost like a haunted house, certainly during the nighttime sequences.

There's a weird blue light in Poirot's room, he's woken up.

And sort of an oddity, a strangeness to the environment,

yet it's full of luxury too.

Now, tell me something about the shooting of the film,

because it's in a remarkably confined space.

It's carriages of a train,

and there's not much room to move.

So how difficult was that to physically work with?

Well, it was constrained,

but it was all based on, you know,

the size of the carriages.

I mean, the cabins were the size of the real cabins.

And Tony Walton

was the Art Director on that film.

And I think he, if I remember correctly,

he'd managed to get

some of the original panels from the train

to be used on the film.

That must have added to the whole atmosphere

of creating the film.

Yes, it did. I think, you know,

the set was confined, but it was very accurate.

But I think everybody quite enjoyed it.

In the grand tradition of the whodunnit,

the film finishes with Poirot

gathering the characters together.

Twelve of them, to match a jury.

And he reveals who killed Ratchett.

It is a tour de force from Finney.

Eight pages of near-monologue,

a character who loves to take centre stage.

It's a performer playing a performer,

a show-off, and a brilliant man

setting the universe to rights.

I am inclined to agree with Mr Foscarelli...Ah!

..who believes that he was a rival member of the mafia,

exacting private vengeance for a vendetta whose precise nature

the Yugoslav police will undoubtedly identify.

But... is that all?

No. No, no, no, no.

No, it is not.

So the conclusion always is with...

..Poirot bringing together

all the suspects into one room,

and then, basically,

delivering a speech

which sort of goes through all his deductions.

I mean, he gives his... This is his chance to be a performer.

This is his chance to be the star of his own show.

Because he can then show off how clever he has been,

in terms of working out 'whodunnit'.

And, in this case, it's wonderful

because not only is Albert Finney

actually probably the perfect Poirot,

he is, of course, an actor of immense capability.

And he sort of gives that whole idea

of being someone on stage in the spotlight,

actually addressing not just suspects,

but an audience.

In November 1974,

Agatha Christie attended the London premiere,

and expressed her rare approval of the film.

Apart from the matter of an underwhelming moustache,

this was her Poirot.

It would be her last public appearance.

She died 14 months after the release of the film.

How well do you think Sidney Lumet serves Agatha Christie?

How well does he depict her world in the novel?

I think he does a really incredible job of both...

..ramping up this 1930s art deco world,

this world of, you know, very kind of wealthy,

international people.

And largely, I should add, a cast of American and English actors

playing all manner of nationalities in the film.

But he also brings something unique to it,

by taking this very...

you might even say stuffy world,

and approaching it differently,

both visually and psychologically.

He is very interested in psychological realism.

These are not cardboard cutouts.

You know, that's the Russian princess, for instance,

and that's the moustachioed Belgian detective.

Yes, OK, on the face of it, that's fine, but...

he is really interested in delving into their perplexity,

their anger, their confusion, their self-deception.

And that's quintessential Lumet.

The film would be a big hit, especially in America

where it helped firmly establish Agatha Christie.

It received six Academy Award nominations,

including Best Actor for Finney.

No other Poirot ever did that.

Ingrid Bergman won Best Supporting Actress

for her no more than a single take, five minutes long,

in which she created an entire character,

and said something about the tragedy of her career.

Though if the Academy had any wit,

they would have given them all an Oscar together.

In the years since Murder On The Orient Express,

Agatha Christie has become an industry.

Nearly all of her books and short stories

have been adapted in one form or another,

some of them good, many mediocre.

But none of them are a match for Finney's core precision.

It's become the signifier,

the classic of an Agatha Christie mystery, hasn't it?

That moment at the end where the detective,

where Poirot, assembles all the characters,

and tells them what happened.

Opportunity for lavish use of flashbacks, of course,

as we see what really happened,

as Poirot describes it.

The actors actually living out those roles

that had led to the original murder.

I'm not sure whether this was the first

real use of it on the screen,

but if so, it was vitally important.

Because that has become the benchmark, if you like.

It's almost... say the words Agatha Christie,

say Hercule Poirot,

and that is what you see.

You see Poirot in,

whether it's the drawing room of a great country house,

or the dining car of the Orient Express,

laying it all out, what happened.

And an amazing thing to act and film, of course.

An amazing job for Albert Finney.

More than even the brand of Agatha Christie,

the whodunnit has become a central tenet of modern culture.

The genre has never been so popular,

the rules firmly fixed in place.

The murder, the suspects, the locations,

the clues, and the eccentric detective.

But Sidney Lumet's Murder On The Orient Express

is not only the definitive Agatha Christie,

but the best of an entire genre.

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