Anglo-Frog Justice

MURDER ON THE Orient Express is the biggest-budget British film ever made, but compared to American blockbusters like The Great Gatsby and Cleopatra, it is an understated film. Europeans don't have the same problems reconciling big money with culture that American artists and moguls use as an excuse for avoiding excellence. Give Fellini and Resnais and Bunuel more money to make a film than they ever dreamed of any they make films that are, indeed, different from their earlier, low-budget works, but films of undoubted high quality. In America, the big money goes only to those directors who sell out to the formulas imposed by their audience and Hollywood manages to ruin men of talent.

Murder on the Orient Express is, self-consciously, the kind of high quality all-star film that was made in the thirties and forties. It aims for the elegant, epigrammatic quality of films like Casablanca, where even the cameos are memorable and throwaway lines seem pregnant with mysterious meaning. Everyone who says anything in Murder on the Orient Express is a distinguished, if not a great, actor or actress. It's silly, but a lot of fun, to have an actress like Ingrid Bergman playing a Scandanavian nanny who "was born backwards" and has visions of "little brown babies" and talks like a night-club comic imitating Greta Garbo.

Aside from the comic spectacle of great actresses playing roles that are beneath their dignity but elevated to something more by the very fact that they are playing them, the most pleasurable thing about Murder is its surface. The flashback sequence at the beginning is pared to the bone; blue filters and slow motion make it into a ballet of form, a non-human prelude to a film that for the rest of its length is nothing but people talking at each other. Next Lumet shows us his cast assembling from all over the world to board the Orient Express at Istanbul. There's the involuntary shudder of pleasure when you recognize a regal Vanessa Redgrave sailing through a crowd of Turkish peddlers, as Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset airily overturn a huge cart of oranges and step up into their carriage. Best of all, the Orient Express itself billows out steam that becomes a cloud of suspicion and hidden motives; it pulls out of the station like a great ocean liner out of port, its wheels grinding out screams that are the counterpoint to murder and conspiracy. Finally, the Express stops dead in the middle of a Yugoslavian blizzard that turns the entire screen white for just a moment. The train is utterly isolated, one of those Agatha Christie devices--like the island cut off from civilization in And Then There Were None or the remote country house in The Mousetrap--that are patently ridiculous but serve as the ground rules for an entertaining game.

CAUGHT IN SUCH a limbo, Hercules Poirot proceeds to solve the mystery. Nowadays, almost any TV detective show has a slicker, more plausible and more difficult plot than Murder on the Orient Express. The mystery seems secondary to the gallery of eccentrics it brings together. The best things in the movie are irrelevant to the story of murder and its solution. Poirot interrogates his witnesses, for example, with George Coulouris and Martin Balsam sitting on the sidelines. Whenever one witness leaves the cabin, one of the two roundly asserts, "He did it" and the other scoffs; when the next witness leaves, they reverse roles. And Lauren Bacall produces the murder weapon from her pocket book with the most roguish look on her face since she told Humphrey Bogart how to whistle in To Have and Have Not.

But the central character is Poirot, played by Albert Finney; he's like a chess player who takes on a dozen opponents simultaneously. Finney's performance is the stumbling-block to the film's otherwise smooth accomplishment of its limited purpose. Finney plays Poirot as an affable tailor's dummy of a man, who wears a hairnet and a moustache band to sleep every night, and whose moustache, indeed, doesn't move when he talks. Poirot is not the coolest of detectives; he's always in control of the situation (this is no Chinatown or Maltese Falcon) but he doesn't care to keep his voice down--sometimes he screams to provoke his diffident witnesses, sometimes he just chortles in glee. "There are too many clues in this room" he sings out in a high-pitched warble as he makes his first inspection of the murder room. Throughout, a heavy Anglo-Frog accent blankets his speech, sometimes making him difficult to understand. Most of the other actors manage to sound vaguely foreign without making their speech an impediment, and Finney is to blame for his bizarre patois.

OTHER BLUNDERS, though, may be credited to Lumet. The disclosure scene is bungled by being to flatly spelled-out; the flashbacks are too insistent, show too much. Everything is reduced to a simple formula; each murderer gets his motive neatly assigned to him. The energy is lost that should be generated in any room containing John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Ingrid Bergman et al. Lumet doesn't seem to realize that such energy won't generate itself, that he has to do something to make it happen. The pace of his film is slow, so slow at the beginning that you can enjoy it purely as an atmosphere picture, as the camera takes in the ornate beauties of the grand trains; but more than atmosphere is needed once the main action gets under way.

Clearly, the aim here is oblique; the all-star cast is being used to reflect some sort of distortion upon itself. Something should happen when Ingrid Bergman parodies her idealistic, spiritual Elsa of thirty years ago. Nothing does; it's played for laughs. Maybe when you have such an assemblage of fine actors and actresses, you assume they can take care of themselves. Lumet seems to have concentrated on keeping the dialogue sparse, and the characterization quick and neat. The result is like a museum restoration with a very serious curator but subject matter laughably warped out of shape. Is Finney's accent a joke? Why does Wendy Hiller look like a nonagenarian who's aged fifty years since The Lady Vanished.?

Murder on the Orient Express emphasizes the sentimental aspects of the Agatha Christie novel it's based on. It presents no layer of cynicism to be penetrated, the kind of tough-minded shell Bogart provided to make sure the final pill wasn't too sweet to swallow. The moral situation on the Orient Express is black and white, and the detective shares everyone's assumptions about right and wrong. There can be no classic confrontations because at bottom everyone agrees. This film doesn't have the kind of hypnotic effect that leaves you spouting its dialogue days later. It's like a party with all the right guests where no one has anything to say, everyone will have a fairly good time, but nothing memorable will happen and few people will show up next time around.