Old Movie Time - "Evil Under The Sun" (1982)

I have just spent a deolightful 1 hour and 57 minutes watching this 1982 movie version of Agatha Christie's whodunit of the same title.  It had everything you would want in an Agatha Christie story....a murder of someone in a confined setting....a limited number of suspects, each of whom had a motive to kill the victim and each of whom had an alibi.  Unfortunately, for the killer, Christie's most famous sleuth, Hercule Poirot also happened to be on the scene.

And as far as a movie goes, it had Peter Ustinov, once again playing Poirot brilliantly, a beautiful  setting, an exclusive resort hotel on an island in the Adriatic Sea, gorgeous costumes, music by Cole Porter, and an all-star cast including James Mason, Roddy McDowell, Sylvia Miles, Jane Birkin, and best of all...Maggie Smith and Diana Rigg.

The movie is worth seeing just to watch Smith and Rigg chew up the scenery as two old stage rivals. Rigg's character made it big time, and Smith's is now forced to running the hotel on the island.  Their meeting once again on the island gives them both some wonderfully bitchy dialog such as this between Smith as Daphne and Rigg as Arlena:

Daphne:  Arlena and I were in the chorus of a show together, not that I could ever compete. Even in those days, she could always throw her legs up in the air higher than any of us... and wider. 

and this:

Arlena : Oh, dear! I'm the last to arrive. 

Daphne: Have a sausage. You must be starving having to wait all that time in your room.

As you can see, Maggie Smith was great at delivering bitchy wisecracks long before "Downton Abbey."

There is also a great scene where Rigg hogs the attention of guests by singing Porter's "You're the Top" while Smith tries to horn in on her.  

Speaking of dialog, the screenplay for this one was written by Anthony Shaffer, who also wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's "Frenzy", which I wrote about in this space a few days ago.  A look at his credits in IMDB includes other goodies like "Sleuth", "Death On The Nile", and "Murder on the Orient Express."  Quite a resume.

"Evil Under the Sun" will go on nobody's list of all-time great movies, but it was beautiful to look at, fun to watch, and very entertaining.  What more would you want in a movie?

Some photos of Miss Smith and Miss Rigg from the movie....

See what I mean about the costumes?

Revisiting A Classic

Any list of all-time great mystery novels will probably include Agatha Christie's 1933 novel,"Murder on the Orient Express".  The novel was written when Agatha Christie was at her prime and it featured her famous fictional detective, Hercule Poirot.

Most people, I would suppose, are more familiar with this story as a result of the 1974 movie version of this story.  This movie was directed by Sidney Lumet, and it starred Albert Finney as Poirot, a role for which he was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, and an all-star cast that included Ingrid Bergman, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in this movie.

In the story, Poirot finds himself a passenger on a filled to capacity passenger coach on the Istanbul-to-Calais Orient Express on a three day trip across Europe.  On the first might out, two significant events take place.  The train hits a snowdrift and and is stranded somewhere in the middle of the Balkans, and one of the passengers is brutally murdered in his compartment, which is right next to Poirot's compartment.

The murdered man's compartment is locked from the inside, the victim's watch is broken so the time of death can be firmly established, a pipe cleaner is found on the floor of the compartment, as is a conductor's uniform button, but no one on the Calais Coach had any motive or reason to murder the dead man.  Or did they?  A railroad official also traveling on the train asks Poirot to take on the case and determine a solution before the tracks are cleared and the local police can reach the train.

The solution to the mystery is what has made this one of Christie's most famous books and why it occupies so many "Best Mysteries" lists. However, this may be one case where the movie that was made from this novel actually outshines the book.  I have read this book several times over the years, but it has probably been at least thirty-five or so years since I last read it, and what I read this time did not hold up to my memory of my enjoyment of the book the first time that I read (which I did well before the movie was produced).  How Poirot reached his conclusions involved some seemingly incomprehensible leaps of reasoning at times.  I also thought that the phrasing sometimes seemed arcane, and Poirot's frequent use of French phrases was a bit annoying.

If you have neither read this book nor seen the movie, I would highly recommend that you do both, but read the book first.  For someone who knows only the 1974 film version of this story, the book might prove to be a disappointment.