The Alphabet Murders
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List Price: $19.98
Features
• Black & White
• NTSC
In Theaters : 17 May, 1966
Video Release : 01 September, 1998 |
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The Alphabet Murders Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Good actors. Terrible writing. Uninspired direction
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This movie played in San Francisco at a first-run theater on Market Street for about a week, disappearing before I got around to seeing it. It never seems to have made the jump to the second-run theaters on Mission Street and I have never encountered it on television, even in the lowest-aspiring, late night disaster fests.
When I stumbled over it here on Amazon, I knew I had to have it, for no better reason than the pleasure of scratching it off my lifelong things-to-do-or-see list. I had absolutely no expectations or hopes for the film and I can say with full confidence that it provided no surprises.
In glancing over the previous Amazon reviews, I find that Tony Randall has been criticized for being wrong for the role--apparently because he does not resemble either David Suchet or Peter Ustinov. Quite to the contrary, if anything, he resembles the written descriptions and the early illustrations of Poirot to a greater extent than either of those two fine actors. Ustinov, a man of imposing size (or at least girth) who refused to dye his hair and mustache to the often-specified unconvincing black, could hardly look less like the dandyish Poirot described by Agatha Christie.
(Dame Agatha, in fact, was never happy with the appearance of any of the actors who portrayed Poirot in her lifetime. The very first of them was, almost unbelievably, Charles Laughton. The second was the mountainous and deep-voiced Francis L. Sullivan.)
No, as far as I'm concerned, the casting of Randall as Poirot, who is after all not an Englishman, but a caricature of a stage Frenchman (Belgian) as seen from the point of view of an upper middle-class young woman during World War I, is not a problem. Robert Morley, the second lead in the film, could have been a perfectly serviceable Hastings, too--if only the writers had allowed him to play Christie's Hastings.
Now, that IS the problem, the writing. "The Alphabet Murders" is based on Agatha Christie's "The ABC Murders," a book with adequately portrayed characters, a strong plot and a clever gimmick, one that has been lifted without credit to Christie and recycled in several books and movies. If the writers had merely adapted the book Christie provided to them, this film would have been some orders of magnitude better and today we might even be criticizing Suchet for not resembling Randall. But the writers did nothing of the sort.
"The Alphabet Murders" was a product of the same team that had perpetrated the Miss Marple series with Margaret Rutherford. (Rutherford makes a final appearance as Miss Marple in the form of a brief, wordless encounter with Poirot early in this film.) The films all are products of a post-War Britain that had foolishly convinced itself that it had outgrown the fusty old classic mysteries of Christie and her peers. They would gladly use Dame Agatha for name recognition, but they certainly would not demean themselves by paying her any respect. I'd even be willing to hazard that the writers had never read any of her books, relying instead on some underpaid and low-skilled "reader" to outline the plots and provide a few character names--all on a single sheet of paper.
Margaret Rutherford was less an actor than a force of nature. So powerful was her personality that she could wrap any kind of writing from Noel Coward's cutting wit to a studio hack's weary tripe around herself and create something marvelously entertaining. Her Miss Marple is wonderful in spite of the fact that she inexplicably shares of the name of a continuing character in a series of mysteries by Agatha Christie. Randall was merely a gifted actor; unlike Rutherford, he could not conjure a silk purse or even a decent performance out of the sows' ears given to him by his writers in place of a real script.
And as the writing, so the direction. These are all low-budget, quickie, black and white films made in an era of wide-screen, technicolor epics. They are fillers and they look like it. The direction is strictly by the numbers, leaving the actors shipwrecked and stranded upon their inadequate scripts.
The result, of course, was an unqualified disaster. A film that snuck into theaters and then snuck out of them again with hardly a ripple.
I assign two stars to "The Alphabet Murders" purely for its curiosity value. After all, that was strong enough to make me lay down a couple of dollars to buy it. |
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