#murder on the orient express (1974)

[bellasbookclub]

murder? on MY Orient Express? it's more likely than you think 🔪❄️🚂

Detectober may be over, but here at BBC we're failing No Stab November with a showing of Murder on the Orient Express (1974)! It's got Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave...seriously, this train is PACKED with the greats. See you this Saturday, November 9th, on our Discord at 8:30 PM EST (11:30 AM AEST Sunday for Aussies) to find out which character (and country) is the stabbiest!

lurkers and new folks always welcome! 🎥 🍿

Bella’s Book Club is an interactive virtual book club created by the Three Books One Plot podcast. Our monthly discord discussions are open to all! More info here.

[cressida-jayoungr]

One Dress a Day Challenge

June: Brown Redux

Murder on the Orient Express / Vanessa Redgrave as Mary Debenham

This patterned dress is a bit busy when paired with the equally boldly patterned coat and scarf. The bronzey brown goes well with her red hair, though.

[lady-of-the-spirit]

Count and Countess Andrenyi are couple goals. Get you a man who will commit murder with you and for you in revenge for your dead family.

[living400lbs]

Glad the 1974 Murder On The Orient Express movie kept the book's ending: "Here are two options. The murderer was someone unknown who walked out alone. Or, it was every passenger on the train but me. I leave it to the train company representative to decide what to tell the police."

TV Poirot: I don't know if I can lie to the police to protect the murderer of a murderer because it goes against my Catholic faith :/

Movie Poirot: I don't know if I can lie to the police to protect the murderer of a murderer because a lie unbalances the world and balance is very important to me :/

Book Poirot: hell yeah lie to the police lying to the police is good and sexy sometimes the law hurts innocent people so fuck that truth shit I am Hercule Poirot and those dumb fucks will believe everything I tell them, take a fuckin sip babes

[hotvintagepoll]

Oh! I’m the Knives Out anon again. I’ve seen that version of Orient Express (and a few other versions + read the book- I’m a big mystery fiction fan!) but to me it still doesn’t quite scratch the itch that casting an actual vintage Knives Out would! Namely, it’s that that combination of having to think about all those different casting types and having to cast with a particular social commentary in mind (because that certainly effects the casting) means having to be particularly careful about who you’re assembling for the cast (and also picking what topic you’d focus on in your chosen vintage time period would be a big part of it, too). The two things together make it an interestingly different project, to me, then casting Orient Express. And tbh though there are definitely themes of class in most versions of Orient Express- Agatha Christie’s plotwork/structural elements are often so much the focal and selling point of much her work (and their many adaptations) that that doesn’t really feel as essential as it would in a vintage Knives Out. (and also I don’t know that Albert Finney as Poirot really fits the niche I’d be looking for in a Daniel Craig-as-Blanc equivalent so I still think there’s some fun thought experiments to be had there. It’s not so much about the characters themselves being similarly scene chewy/fun or Blanc clearly being a kind of descent of Poirot as a character- for me the most essential part about recasting it is that it’s someone coming right off of a career defining, pop culturally significant, tonally polar opposite role like James Bond was)

this is a good ask and i don't have anything else to add

[blackramhall]

Murder on the Orient Express was released in the UK on 22 November 1974.

Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. WS, Ha Avatar pic by Mitchell Turek

[john-deco]

Just a heads up that when Kino Lorber’s 4K release of the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express, I am absolutely going to be insufferable about it and comparing it to the wonderful HD Paramount remaster that was done in 2018/2022.

I apologize to all my mutuals and advance.

[living400lbs]

IMDb says Albert Finney was 37 when cast (Alec Guinness wasn't available) so I'm wondering if he was hunching to appear older. Reportedly he was wearing lots of "aging" makeup, as was the actress playing the princess.

I was surprised at first that characters (especially Poirot) wore pajamas AND a dressing gown/robe in bed, inside the covers. Possibly due to "the train is in the snowy mountains, it's cold, add that layer" or "even in bed one is aware it's a train, the attendant could walk in".

BTW Poirot put on gloves after his hand lotion. Cold? Or wanting to help the lotion soak in?

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

I thought the mystery and the reveal were both kinda lame. If this is supposed to be the best Agatha Christie then geez... I don't think I like Agatha Christie. The best thing about it was Albert Finney's ridiculous performance as the detective Hercule Poirot.

[bacallbazaar]

Lauren Bacall in Murder on the Orient Express (1974).

[morgangalaxy43]

Murder mysteries will always be one of the best movies and book genres of all time with some of coolest mysteries

[cantsayidont]

In a fit of I know not what, I also watched the following:

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS: Kenneth Branagh is an unlikely choice to play Agatha Christie's eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, and neither his performance nor his direction brings much life to this glossy but slapdash adaptation of one of Christie's most famous books. As with the 1974 film version with Albert Finney, the star-studded cast is both a major selling point and a central weakness: Many of the big names act like they've wandered in from completely different movies, preventing the film from ever feeling of a piece. (The casting of Johnny Depp, even as the film's most detestable character, also sits ill, as does a disagreeable opening sequence set in prewar Jerusalem.) Moreover, the prominence of the stars eventually underscores the absurdity of the story's ludicrous denouement. For all its popularity, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS is really one of Christie's weaker mysteries, particularly now that the real-world Lindbergh kidnapping that obviously inspired the novel has faded from the popular consciousness. As a story, EXPRESS is best served by adaptations less burdened by stunt casting, like the 1992 BBC Radio 4 dramatization, with John Moffat as Poirot. If you're mostly interested in costume porn, stick with the 1974 film, which isn't a great movie either, but has superior costume design and fine cinematography to help keep you awake through its many lulls.

DEATH ON THE NILE: Perfectly dreadful big-budget adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel gets off to a bad start with a stupid framing sequence claiming that Poirot is a heroic (and heterosexual!) WW1 veteran who grew his famous mustache to cover battle scars, and gets worse from there. The main plot remains faithful enough to the original novel to make its variances all the more distracting (without changing the fact that anyone familiar with the book or the earlier adaptations already knows the solution to the mystery!), its slick production values are badly undermined by terrible CGI inserts, and many of the stars are miscast or just plain awful (with Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, and Russell Brand particularly bad). Either the overstuffed 1978 feature version with Peter Ustinov or the 2004 David Suchet TV movie is a much better use of your time.

A HAUNTING IN VENICE: The third time's not the charm in this lavishly produced but unsatisfying reinvention of Christie's 1969 HALLOWE'EN PARTY, relocated from late-sixties England to postwar Vienna. Hercule Poirot's old friend, mystery novelist and Christie self-insert Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey, fingernails-on-chalkboard bad), lures the great detective out of retirement to attend a Halloween party in the supposedly haunted palazzo of former diva Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), where noted spiritualist Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) plans to hold a seance to contact the spirit of Drake's daughter, who recently committed suicide. The mystery itself is okay (and is so far removed from the original story as to be barely recognizable), but the gothic horror trappings seem misplaced (more Conan Doyle than Christie), Michelle Yeoh is completely wasted, some of the supporting cast is distractingly awful (like Kyle Allen as the dead girl's former fiancée), and Branagh remains wholly unconvincing as Poirot. Significantly better than its two predecessors, but that's no great achievement unless you just want to stare at the scenery, and any time you start thinking it's really not so bad, Tina Fey wanders back in to set your nerves on edge.

Why Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green are so determined to make Hercule Poirot into a bad pastiche of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey is a bigger mystery than the plots of any of these movies, but I wish they'd cut it out — or at least turn their attention in some other direction. At that, Branagh would probably make a decent Peter Wimsey: He's the right age and temperament, and Lord Peter (who IS a haunted, more-or-less hetero WW1 veteran) seems much more in line with Branagh's predilections than Poirot.

[thevalleyisjolly]

I simply think that if you're an actor who's going to play Hercule Poirot, you need to at least read several Hercule Poirot mysteries in addition to the story you're acting in. He's insufferable because he's vain and arrogant, not because he's a drama queen. He acts like a drama queen not because he's actually overcome by emotion but because he deliberately plays into perceptions of himself as a funny little foreigner so that people will underestimate him. The big reveal at the end of the mystery are because he's spent the whole story keeping his thoughts close to his chest and the grandiose speeches are a way for Christie to show the reader how his brain has been working, they're not just because he's an attention whore. He is an attention whore, but he is very conscious about the shape of that attention - he doesn't just want people to look at him, he specifically wants people to recognize how clever he is. And you won't get this if you just read one Poirot book, you need to read at least two or three in order to recognize what's part of his character and what he's putting on as part of an act for the sake of the investigation.

[cressida-jayoungr]

Coeli's Picks: Blue, part 2

(Multiple movies listed left to right.)

One Dress a Day Challenge

July: Blue Redux (+ Green Redux)

Love Me or Leave Me (1955) / Doris Day as Ruth Etting

Lady Macbeth (2016) / Florence Pugh as Katherine Lester

Mirror, Mirror (2012) / Lily Collins as Snow White

"I didn't realize until just now that this is a wedding dress! Ah well."

Dangerous Liaisons (1988) / Glenn Close as the Marquise de Merteuil

(I actually featured this one during the first month of blue--see here.)

Crimson Peak (2015) / Jessica Chastain as Lady Lucille Sharpe

Mad Men / Christina Hendricks as Joan Harris

"I've never watched the show, but the costuming, especially for this character, is stunning."

Murder on the Orient Express (1974) / Jacqueline Bisset as Countess Elena Andrenyi

"Tricky to find a good shot of this one, as she's often seen in a white fur stole that partially obscures it and is mostly sitting down."

(And what an interesting neckline!)

Singin' in the Rain (1952) / Debbie Reynolds as Kathy Selden

Immortal Beloved (1994) / Valeria Golino as Giulietta Guicciardi

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956) / Jane Russell as Mamie Stover

[apicturespeaks]

Murder on the Orient Express, Sidney Lumet

[erving-goffman]

the 1978 version of death on the nile has?? mia farrow?? bette davis?? jane birkin???? among others

[thezombiegeekinthehawaiianshirt]