Day 122 - 5/2/09 - Movie #120
BEFORE: Another crime taking place on a train - and back-to-back movies with Sean Connery! Albert Finney (one of my fav. actors) plays Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's famous sleuth, surrounded by a train-ful of stars: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Connery, Sir John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Perkins and Michael York - it's like a high-class version of "The Love Boat"!
THE PLOT: In 1935, when his train is stopped by deep snow, detective Hercule Poirot is called on to solve a murder that occurred the night before.
AFTER: You know that scene in murder mysteries where the detective gathers all the suspects together and reveals how the crime was committed? This movie has perhaps the best one ever, a yarn that takes about a half-hour of screen time for Poirot to unravel. It's just too bad that all of the threads lead back to another incident that took place years ago, which we (the audience) only see brief flashes of at the start of the film. Since we don't know all the details of THAT crime, there's zero chance that we could solve the murder on the train ourselves. It's also too bad that I read the MAD magazine parody of this film years ago, and it tipped me off to the solution. That was back in the day, when a "spoiler" was just part of a sportscar... I would have preferred to watch a murder mystery without advance knowledge of how the crime was committed. Oh well, I've got two other Agatha Christie movies on my list that I quite fortunately know nothing about.
RATING: 5 out of 10 stab-wounds
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