Murder on the Orient Express (2017): A Return Ticket

Abstract

In the first scene of Kenneth Branagh’s big-screen adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express (1934)—one of Agatha Christie’s three most popular novels, according to a 2015 poll (Flood)—famous Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot plagues the staff members of a Jerusalem hotel with his unusual request for two eggs of identical size. He goes so far as to apply a ruler to his breakfast, only to conclude that it does not meet his requirements. The scene serves as a neat summary of the character that will likely sit well with hardcore Christie admirers—the author famously had Captain Hastings characterize Poirot as a man so meticulous that ‘a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound’ (1920/2007: 14)—and the shot of Branagh (the film’s star as well as its director) cowering behind his breakfast table and scrutinizing the eggs sets up Murder on the Orient Express as an adaptation that literally goes ab ovo. It invokes the initial description of the character in Christie’s debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (‘His head was exactly the shape of an egg’, 1920/2007: 14), and at the same time it is indicative of how the film reboots Christie for the twenty-first century, playing up Poirot’s tics while also humanizing him, an adaptive policy that has worked wonders for Sherlock Holmes. Like Guy Ritchie’s action-packed adventures starring Robert Downey Jr.’s deeply eccentric and queer detective, Murder on the Orient Express hooks into canonical though rarely adapted details in order to revamp the character for the big screen. Instead of Peter Ustinov’s inspired buffoonery or David Suchet’s reverend take on the character, we get a world-weary loner who mourns for ‘ma chère Katherine’ and thus comes fully equipped with a customary backstory wound, not to mention a well-publicized, exuberant moustache that has received more press than the cast—no mean feat, given the film’s assembled star wattage. Where Christie’s Poirot relies exclusively on his insight into the human psyche to solve a case, Branagh treats the viewer to an amalgam of various screen sleuths; like Downey Jr.’s Holmes, he shakes off the character’s predominant image as an armchair detective and shows that he can hold his own in a chase or in a fight. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, particularly since the film has an eye on establishing Poirot as a new serialized hero for the big screen—indeed, a sequel was announced only a few weeks after the film’s release. Where Christie had Poirot ridicule the Sherlockian method of obsessing over fingerprints and footprints (‘the Hercule Poirots, they are above the experts! To them the experts bring the facts, their business is the method of the crime, its logical deduction, the proper sequence and order of the facts’, 1923/2011: 13), the exposition of Branagh’s film sees him solve a case because he spots the culprit’s preferred footwear.