Last summer, to prepare for the upcoming movie version, I reread Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Christie was the bestselling writer of the 20th century and Murder on the Orient Express is one of her most famous works. But I found it almost agonizingly tedious. It reads more like the schematic of a great mystery novel than a mystery novel itself. Though it centers on the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of a child, the book itself comes across as self-satisfied, tetchy, and as emotionless as its detective, Hercule Poirot.
Then I made the mistake of renting and watching the 1974 movie directed by Sidney Lumet, which I remembered with great fondness for its jaunty re-creation of lavish Depression-era travel and its multinational celebrity cast. Alas, my memory was flawed, because the movie stinks. It’s incredibly slow and oddly underplotted and it plays not as a murder mystery but an overstuffed comedy like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Almost nothing happens in its first 30 minutes. And when we finally get to the Istanbul train station from which the Orient Express is departing, it plays like a version of the opening three minutes of Fantasy Island, during which Mr. Roarke introduces all the guests and we get to see Carol Lynley as a stewardess who wants to go back to high school and Bert Convy as a stationery salesman who wants to find Bigfoot. Look! It’s Richard Widmark! Isn’t that Anthony Perkins? Hey, it’s Jacqueline Bisset! Ingrid Bergman playing a missionary! And buried under that makeup as Poirot—why, it’s Albert Finney!
The criticism, and there’s a lot of it, of the new Murder on the Orient Express is that it is impure and anachronistic. Kenneth Branagh directed and stars, and he tries to make Poirot a comprehensible character rather than an assemblage of tics and eccentricities. To this end, his Poirot is driven by obsessive-compulsive behavior rather than conceited and misanthropic snobbery—a fond friend and a perfectly nice fellow, but he is cursed with an eye that can spot the imperfection in anything. He cannot bear to eat eggs that aren’t perfectly proportioned. He can see how the tiniest crack in a wall will reveal the identity of a thief.
While Christie’s Poirot is pompous about his genius, screenwriter Michael Green (who also wrote this year’s Logan and cowrote Blade Runner 2049) makes Poirot an unwilling savant. The eye for imperfection that makes him the world’s greatest detective also causes him unnecessary suffering. And unlike the somewhat Nietzschean Poirot of Christie’s creation, who has an entirely clinical view of killing, the Branagh-Green Poirot has a profound moral sense and uses it in part to help him solve the murder.
The OCD stuff is a perfectly acceptable gloss on Christie’s characterization of Poirot as a man obsessed with symmetry, who arranges his books by height. But the emotionalism of Branagh’s Poirot is certainly something new. He also seems rather evolved, especially on matters of race and religion. This is a radical revision of his creator’s worldview, given that Christie freely used the N-word in the title of a novel and was a classically tweedy British anti-Semite.
Well, I’m not a Christie purist, to put it mildly, so I found the new Poirot an affecting companion on this Murder on the Orient Express, which is in almost every respect the superior of the movie that preceded it. It’s beautiful to look at, moves swiftly, and establishes its cast of potential killers more efficiently. Johnny Depp does a terrific turn as a lowlife art thief trying and failing to put on airs, and Michelle Pfeiffer offers a multilayered performance as a theatrical divorcée who is far more theatrical than anyone can imagine.
The movie’s greatest failing is the novel’s. The event that sets the story in motion is a kidnapping inspired by the Lindbergh baby case. Christie contrived to get the baby’s killer and a whole bunch of other Americans involved in the matter out of Long Island and on a train from Istanbul to Calais two years later. It was ridiculously implausible when the book came out in 1934 and it’s no less ridiculous now.
What Green and Branagh add to the proceedings is a feeling of outrage at the original crime and the effect its consequences might have not only on everyone who had to survive it but also on the detective who finds himself involved after the fact. This is an immeasurable improvement on the original, and it makes their Murder on the Orient Express a surprisingly powerful and involving film. You might even enjoy it more if you choose masochistically to see it only after you experience the utter tedium of the book and the cheesy lousiness of the old movie.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
