Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

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Movie
German title Murder on the Orient Express
Original title Murder on the Orient Express
Country of production United Kingdom
original language English
Publishing year 1974
length 131 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Sidney Lumet
script Paul Dehn
production John Brabourne
Richard B. Goodwin
music Richard Rodney Bennett
camera Geoffrey Unsworth
cut Anne V. Coates
occupation
synchronization

Mord im Orient-Express (original title: Murder on the Orient Express ) is a crime film by the director Sidney Lumet from 1974 based on the novel of the same name by Agatha Christie from 1934. 2010 and 2017 films of the same name were released .

action

The film begins with a collage of scenes, newspaper clippings, and commentary about the case of a little girl named Daisy Armstrong , kidnapped from the home of her parents, wealthy and well-respected citizens, in the United States in 1930 and found dead after paying the ransom .

Five years later: The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot has just closed a case in Jordan and is traveling back to London via wintry Istanbul . When he wants to book a compartment in the Istanbul- Calais through car of the next Orient Express , it turns out that the train is fully booked. With the help of his friend Signor Bianchi, the director of the sleeping car company , Poirot gets a place in the sleeping car . In the dining car , the American businessman Samuel Edward Ratchett made him the following offer: Poirot should guard him for a lot of money, because he regularly received death threats and slept with a gun under his pillow. Poirot refuses the offer. At night Poirot is woken up several times by strange noises. In the middle of the night between Winkowitz and Brod in Yugoslavia , Ratchett is murdered by twelve knife wounds and found dead that morning.

The express train has now got stuck in the snow on the open stretch of Yugoslav territory. Nobody can leave the train, not even the murderer. The telegraph is on strike and the Yugoslav police cannot be notified. So Signor Bianchi, who is also on the train, asks Hercule Poirot to clarify the case. In the dead man's compartment, Poirot finds a half-burned letter from which he can deduce the dead person's true identity. It is about the mafioso and criminal Cassetti, who kidnapped the little Daisy Armstrong and is responsible for her murder and subsequent deaths, but who was able to evade just punishment in the USA.

Cassetti / Ratchett was killed with twelve stitches and the strange thing about it is that the stitches were executed at different depths and with different strengths. At the scene of the crime, a handkerchief and a pipe cleaner are also found and in one of the suitcases of the fellow travelers the uniform of a sleeper-car attendant .

Everyone on the train is interrogated, but there is no one on board to admit to having the pipe cleaner and handkerchief found.

The solutions

At the end of his investigation, Poirot presents the traveler with two solutions. The first and from his point of view simpler solution is that Cassetti was murdered by a rival Mafioso. The second solution, in his opinion, is more complex. According to his investigations, all travelers had either been employed by the Armstrong house or were close relatives or friends of the family. Little Daisy had grown dear to all of them, and after the kidnapping they vowed to hold the perpetrator accountable. After Daisy's kidnapping and murder, Daisy's mother had died giving birth to another child and this newborn, and the father had committed suicide, as had a maid falsely suspected of being complicit.

All the suspects went through the Ratchett / Cassetti compartment one at a time, each stabbing him once. It concerns the grandmother (Mrs. Hubbard), the aunt and the uncle (Countess and Count Andrenyi) and the nanny Daisys (Greta Ohlsson), the butler (Mr. Beddoes), the cook (Hildegarde Schmidt), the Chauffeur (Mr. Foscarelli) and the secretary (Miss Debenham) of the Armstrongs, the godmother (Princess Dragomiroff) and a suitor (Mr. McQueen) of Daisy's mother, a friend of Daisy's father (Col. Arbuthnot) and the Father (sleeper coach Pierre Paul Michel) and friend (Mr. Hardman) of the late maid .

Poirot gives the head of the railway company the choice of which theory he would like to present to the Yugoslav police in this case: either the story of a stranger who broke into the train and disguised as a conductor, who is said to have murdered Ratchett on behalf of the Mafia, or the story of the collective murder of travelers.

Bianchi decides to present the Yugoslav police with the simpler solution with the ominous stranger.

The train is freed from the snow and the travelers toast each other .

background

The kidnapping case of the Charles Lindbergh baby in the 1930s was the inspiration for the fictional "Daisy Armstrong" case. Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the son of aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh, was kidnapped from his parents' home in March 1932 at the age of 20 months. After paying a ransom of $ 50,000, the toddler was found murdered.

A maid employed by Mrs. Lindbergh's parents was wrongly suspected of complicity and committed suicide after very harsh police interrogation. This incident served Agatha Christie as the motive for the involvement of the sleeping-car conductor Pierre Michel in the murder of Ratchett / Cassetti by creating the maid Paulette Michel - daughter of Pierre Michel - based on the model of the maid from the Lindbergh case for the novel also committed suicide after unlawful suspicion.

The Lindbergh case had not yet been resolved at the time Murder was first published on the Orient Express in January 1934. It was not until September 1934 that Bruno Hauptmann was arrested as a suspected perpetrator. Although doubts arose in the course of the subsequent trial, Hauptmann was found guilty of murder in 1935 and executed in 1936.

Some details

  • The "Pick Me Up" Amber Moon that Ratchett / Cassetti is supposed to be served by his servant Beddoes the morning after his murder does exist. It's a cocktail made from Tabasco , whiskey and a raw egg .
  • The sleeping pill " Trional ", which Count and Countess Andrenyi take and presumably anesthetized Cassetti / Ratchett, actually existed in the 1930s. The chemical formula C 2 H 5 CH 3 —C— (SO 2 C 2 H 5 ) 2 for diethylsulfon-methylethylmethane given in the film is also correct, and in the 1930s the drug was considered one of the best and most effective sleeping pills. In fact, it was also used as a murder weapon. It was used by the National Socialists as a means of murdering the mentally ill in Action T4 .
  • The novel Love's Captive, which is read by the butler Beddoes on the night of the murder, is, like its author Arabella Richardson, fictitious.
  • Signor Bianchi is called Monsieur Bouc in the novel, Mr. Beddoes is called Edward Henry Masterman.
  • The corpse has twelve stab wounds ("12 passengers apart from me and the murdered man"); however, including the sleeper conductor Pierre, there are 13 other people in the Calais carriage. The explanation from the book that Count Andrenyi only stabbed on behalf of his wife is suppressed, but in the film they stab together once.
  • The film was filmed in the Emi Elstree film studios in Borehamwood , England .
  • The cameras and lenses came from Panavision , the footage from Technicolor .
  • The film was shot in the Landy train station near Paris and on the line between Pontarlier and Gilley in the Doubs department, which was closed soon after filming was completed . The typical French milestones can be seen on the road next to the track.
  • The train's steam locomotive is the SNCF's 230 G 353 express train locomotive built in 1922 , the former PO 4353 of the Compagnie du chemin de fer de Paris à Orléans . It was never used before the historic Orient Express. The CIWL had no mainline locomotives, but regulated the traction service contractually with the respective national railways, for the Orient Express in the section covered by the film, that is, with the railway companies of Turkey, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.
  • When leaving the alleged Belgrade train station , you can briefly see another French locomotive.
  • Some cars are UIC - car numbers to identify which were only introduced in the 1960s.
  • At the beginning of the 1935 film, several men can be seen in Istanbul with fez . However, wearing this was forbidden in Turkey since 1925.
  • At that time, snow-covered cuts in railway lines were cleared by workers with shovels (today this is possible using machines with snow blowers). Snow plows could (and can) only be used on open terrain on both sides.
  • In reality, a snow plow would never have worked in the direction of the train to be freed if it had been so close to the place of work (see also previous point).
  • Ingrid Bergman was originally supposed to play the role of Princess Dragomiroff. However, she found the role of the Swedish missionary more liking and was able to get the director through this. Ultimately, she got an Oscar for this role.

Awards

In 1975 the film received six Oscar nominations:

Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar.

Reviews

source rating
Rotten tomatoes
critic
audience
IMDb
  • “Opulent film adaptation of the Christie classic [...] ; Chamber play-like all-star production with fine character studies […] . ”(Rating: 3 out of 4 possible stars = very good)  - Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz in Lexicon“ Films on TV ” (extended new edition). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 582.
  • “Optically brilliant, ironically tinted film adaptation of a novel by Agatha Christie. A cheerful, parodic entertainment with a Hollywood touch and international star cast. ”  -“ Lexicon of international film ”.
  • "Overall, Lumet's film is like the location, the Pullman car on the Orient Express: well-groomed, luxurious, and comfortably old-fashioned."  - Berliner Morgenpost , Berlin.
  • "This reencounter with great actors [...] is the only attraction of the film."  - Süddeutsche Zeitung , Munich.
  • “Not a big hit, but an amusing chamber play.”  - Rheinische Post , Düsseldorf.

Other versions

In 1955, Hercule Poirot Solve the Murder on the Orient Express was broadcast as the seventh episode of the television series The Gallery of Great Detectives .

In 2001 a television film was produced for US television under the direction of Carl Schenkel , in which Alfred Molina played the leading role of Hercule Poirot. The plot has been brought into the present. Despite well-known actors such as Alfred Molina, Meredith Baxter , Peter Strauss and Leslie Caron , this remake had little success with both critics and audiences.

In 2009, a television film was produced under the direction of Philip Martin for the English ITV and the American WGBH Boston as part of the Agatha Christie's Poirot series.

In 2015, Japanese television broadcast an adaptation of Agatha Christie's crime thriller Murder on the Orient Express .

In November 2017, a sixth film was released with another large star cast. Kenneth Branagh directed and starred.

synchronization

The German dubbing was created in 1975 in the studios of Berliner Synchron  GmbH in Berlin . The dialogue book was written by Hans Bernd Ebinger and Gert Günther Hoffmann directed the dubbing .

media

DVD release

  • Murder on the Orient Express. Kinowelt Home Entertainment 2003.

Documentary film

  • Making "Murder on the Orient Express". Video documentary by Laurent Bouzereau, USA 2004, 49 minutes (included on the US DVD release of the film).

Soundtrack

  • Richard Rodney Bennett : Murder on the Orient Express. Original motion picture soundtrack. The Royal Opera House Orchestra under the baton of Marcus Dods will play. On: Poirot At the Movies. Music from the Agatha Christie Thrillers "Murder on the Orient Express" & "Death On the Nile". Cloud Nine Records / Silva Screen Records, London 1993, sound carrier no. CNS 5007.
  • Richard Rodney Bennett: Murder on the Orient Express. EMI Classics 7243 5 86168 2 2 (Re-release from 2004, the CD also includes Bennett's soundtrack Lady Caroline Lamb ).

literature

  • Agatha Christie : Murder on the Orient Express. Roman (Original title: Murder on the Orient Express ). Translated from English by Otto Bayer. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-596-17422-5 .
  • Lawrence J. Quirk : Ingrid Bergman and Her Films. Translated from American English by Marie Margarete Giese. Goldmann, Munich 1982, pp. 161 f., ISBN 3-442-10214-6 .
  • Georg Seeßlen : Agatha Christie in the film. In: Georg Seeßlen: Murder in the cinema. History and mythology of the detective film. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1981, ISBN 3-499-17396-4 .

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ On Lindbergh and child abduction see: Andrew Scott Berg: Charles Lindbergh. An idol of the 20th century. Blessing, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-89667-089-1 .
  2. ↑ a b Murder on the Orient Express at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
  3. ↑ Murder on the Orient Express in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  4. ↑ Murder on the Orient Express. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 5, 2016 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  5. ↑ the first performance was on November 2nd at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
  6. ↑ Brent Lang: Steven Spielberg Pentagon Papers Drama Gets 2017 Oscar Season Release . In: Variety , September 6, 2017. Retrieved March 3, 2019. 
  7. ↑ Murder on the Orient Express '74. ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.synchrondatenbank.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Arne Kaul's synchronous database, accessed on August 19, 2007.