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When you think about Hercule Poirot, the eccentric detective and Agatha Christie’s most famous creation, three things come to mind. First, he is a moustache enthusiast of some renown. Second, he is not now, nor has he ever been, Sherlock Holmes. Third, what Sean Connery is to James Bond, David Suchet is to Poirot – supposedly other actors have portrayed him over the years, though I can’t think of any (probably due to turkey induced fatigue). It surprised me, then, to learn that Suchet had never played Poirot in his adventure which most penetrated the zeitgeist – it’s like Sean never making Goldfinger, or Mel Gibson never going insane. Until now, that is.
Fresh from wrapping up a murder-mystery in Palestine involving the British army, during which the guilty suspect took his own life, an introspective Poirot is journeying back to London via Istanbul. He passes the time by eavesdropping the conversations of nervous passers-by, and watches a pregnant woman be stoned for adultery without any outward trace of shock. Later, he bumps into an old friend in the lobby of his up-market hotel, who happens to be a director of the Orient Express, and conveniently secures Poirot a cabinet on the next outbound train.
So Poirot boards the train full, naturally, of suspicious looking characters with nervous twitches and misery in their eyes. Shortly thereafter, the train gets stranded by a snow drift. And to make things worse, an obnoxious American businessman is brutally murdered. It’s lucky, then, that good old Hercule is knocking about, and he quickly ascertains the real identity of the victim (he wasn’t a nice man at all) and, through a series of cunning observations, unmasks the murderer a full day before the local myrmidons of the law arrive with some grit and hot chocolate.
As a non-aficionado of Suchet’s Poirot antics, I can’t say how this turn stacks up against his previous outings. In this, however, he’s a pretty unimpressive character. Instead of brilliant and definable personality, he floats around the stranded train like a perennially pissed-off penguin, joining up the dots thanks to carelessness on the part of the executioners and lucky glimpses of events from peeping outside the door every time he hears a noise. Maybe I’ve been raised on too many Sherlock Holmes derivatives, but the mystery is less impressive if not unravelled by almost magical deductive gymnastics.
His treatment as an impassioned defender of the rule of law rather than any sense of mob justice is a little awkward, and this is supposed to reflect his earlier impassivity to the mob stoning, though how exactly this is so is narratively muddled. Human law is a shield which doesn’t always work, claims Poirot, but it’s still better than everyone having their swords drawn. In the end, he takes the road of natural justice, despite his prior protestations. We knew, though, that it was coming – any other outcome would have sucked any last drop of humanity from the Gallic iceberg.
The rest of the cast are adequate pegs on which Poirot can hang his moustache and rosary beads, though none are scene-stealing. The viewer gets buffeted by the varying quality of accents on show, which range from the only-slightly-dodgy (Suchet has all but perfected his) to mangled yelps which are surely transplanted from ‘Allo ‘Allo. Likewise, a constant orchestra of squeaky violins (reminding us we are on The Train of Doooom) are mixed with claustrophobic filming, which is no doubt purposeful but too frenetic and headache-inducing in the closed train compartments. So there you have it: predictable, well-worn, and messy. Everything you would expect from an ITV Christmas special.
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