So is the movie, although it’s careful never to make its essentially comic intentions get in the way of Miss Christie’s well-oiled mystery. The performance is brilliant, and it’s high comedy. His hair is slicked down to a patent-leather shine, his eyes have somehow become beady and suspicious, his French mustache is constantly quivering with alarm (real and pretend), and he scurries up and down the train like a paranoid crab. Albert Finney, who plays Poirot, is the most impressive, largely because we can never for a moment that he is Finney. “Murder on the Orient Express” is a splendidly entertaining movie of the sort that isn’t made anymore: It’s a classical whodunit, with all the clues planted and all of them visible, and it’s peopled with a large and expensive collection of stars.
Poirot arranges to begin a series of interviews and plunges himself (and the rest of us) into a net of intrigue so deep, so deceptive, and so labyrinthine that only Agatha Christie would have woven it. The list of suspects is long, but limited: It includes everybody on board the crack Orient Express, en route from Istanbul to Calais, and currently brought to a standstill by an avalanche of snow that has fallen across the track. This is the quite obviously a case for Hercule Poirot, the most famous detective in the world, and, over breakfast, he agrees to accept it. The next morning, it’s revealed that Ratchett, the hateful American millionaire, has been stabbed to death in his sleep. Hercule Poirot, Adjusting the devices that keep his hair slicked down and his mustache curled up, pauses for a moment in his train compartment. There is a cry of alarm, some muffled French, a coming and going in the corridor.
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