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.