Murder on the Orient Express

If you look carefully, you can see chewing marks on the set.

Murder on the Orient Express takes place in 1930, but oddly looks like a bunch of people from the 70’s wearing period clothing.  Oh, hey, it was filmed in 1974!  Everyone has giant sideburns, unkempt facial hair, and there’s that 70’s film covering the camera lens.  God the 70’s were terrible.  They can’t even convincingly portray a time period a mere forty years prior.

It’s easy to be distracted by the 70’sness of it all since there’s little to this movie other than the central whodunit. It’s just a series of interviews led by a detective to find out who killed a train passenger.   Like so much of the production, the victim’s Texas drawl is pretty out of place.  It would probably more at home starring in Dallas than a period drama, so his death isn’t much of a loss.

The interview format leads to a star-studded cast where each star has about five minutes of screen time.  They make the most of those few minutes and overact the crap out of their roles.  Even Ingrid Bergman, the Most Fantastic Woman that Ever Lived, is pretty grating.  The main detective is even worse.  He’s in every scene and does the most off-putting impression of a French person I’ve seen since Gérard Depardieu.

I suspect the whole affair won’t be much fun if you’ve already read the Agatha Christie novel.  Luckily, reading is passé and everything worth reading has been turned into a movie by now.  This one stays true to its book roots by having almost all of the content involve old people talking to each other.  Still, the underlying mystery is pretty good and has an unexpected resolution.  To me anyway.  The last book I read’s twist was that the protagonist did not, in fact, like green eggs or ham.  I just didn’t see it coming.

Rating: Must-see

Did I fast-forward: No.  That’d be like reading the last page of a book first.

Gaslight

Oh, you're right, I'm not sure where I left the car keys. OH GOD I'M INSANE!

Gaslight is essentially the same movie as Rosemary’s Baby, but with less Satanic children.  Here, Ingrid Bergman married badly, as her new husband tries to convince her she is insane.  We know this because around 100 minutes of the 113 minute runtime is spent with the husband manipulating her with such clever ruses as giving her a brooch, taking it back, and being all, “Ooooo, where did it go?  You must be INSANE!!!”  He is assisted in his efforts by Ingrid Bergman having the intellectual capacity of a two year old, and Angela Lansbury.  This is all done for some overly-complicated reason that is revealed in the last three minutes of the movie.

Seriously, if a few games of peek-a-boo and some parlor tricks is all it takes to keep Ingrid Bergman locked in your attic for months at a time, well, frankly, I’m kind of sad I missed the 40’s.  The plot pretty much relies on men running women’s lives to such a degree that they need to compose a note and leave it under their husband’s separate bedroom door in order to get permission to take a crap.  She got an Oscar for this, which is weird, given how misogynistic the 40’s were.  You’d think “women be crazy” wouldn’t garner much notice from the Academy. 

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: Only for the 18^th scene of her slowly being driven insane, this time by a letter that she read OR DID SHE?  (She did.)