Lord Edgware Dies

The reviews are,by and large,unfair. It was the early thirties and one should not ask for Finney's and Ustinov's movies or Suchet's TV series.

This is one of Christie's best books,in a golden decade ("the ABC murders ", " death on the nile " "death in the clouds","murder on the orient express ", 'the Tuesday club murders" ,ending with her triumph "and then were none" );if my memory serves me well , it's one sentence which makes the little gray cells discover the whole truth .

Written in 1933 ,the year before, it is anyway interesting for Christie's fans to see early movies based on her books;although not as good as "love from a stranger"(based on the short story "Philomel Cottage ), "lord Edgware dies " , it is ,for the time, an interesting adaptation.

Trevor may not physically be Poirot (no moustache,tall and not bald) ,but it's false to write there is no hint at Belgian :he has an accent and one can hear many French words in the dialog ( "mon cher ami" "mon Dieu",etc ) Hastings serves as a foil to him (it's his dr Watson),and when he hears that Lady Edgware might be a potential criminal, his tea goes down the wrong way .

Christie's fans should try and watch "the ninth guest" ,released the very same year ,not from one of her books, but contains the seeds of "and then there were none" .

Lady Edgeware, played by Jane Carr, is a Hollywood actress married to C. V. France. She wants a divorce, and hires Hercule Poirot, played by Austin Trevor, in his third go-around as Agatha Christie's detective. The next day, France is stabbed to death. As long as he's there, Poirot uses his little grey cells to solve the murder.

It's a cheap version of the novel, with acting honors to Richard Cooper as Hastings, largely for his ability to save a shot by turning an error, like catching his umbrella handle on a door, into a minor comic bit. The rest of it is almost uninterrupted talk, as Trevor asks seemingly irrelevant questions.

My issue with Agatha Christie is this: she could plot the heck out of a mystery, playing endlessly with the bits of the classic British form, but she couldn't write very well. Her characters are all stock types; Poirot, for example, is Belgian - called French here - because this would permit her to indulge in a few pat phrases to stand in for an actual character. Being Continental, he didn't matter. Her Americans are standard British Stage characters, yokels with money or dumb and predatory women. Her choice of words is repetitious.

Ah, but her plots, her machinations with locked rooms and impossible murderers! That's where she excelled. And that would be the case here, were it not that the film is structured so that there is a severely limited number of suspects, and Poirot simply has to eliminate them. When he points the finger, will the criminal admit it's a fair cop? Probably. That's what the English do, isn't it?

I love Agatha Christie stories, she was an excellent writer no matter what people think or say. I read her entire work. But I think casting-wise Hastings should have been Piorot and Poirot should have been Hastings but that's just my opinion, watch it and see if you like it. One of the earliest versions of Agatha Christie as far as I know.

While certainly not a good movie, Lord Edgeware Dies does have a few good things in it. Number one is Jane Carr as the blithe blonde Lady Edgeware, who brings a lot of fun to her role and gets the film's final, comical line.

Then there's Christie's mystery, which the movie does a pretty good job of laying out, even if the short length means clues are discovered and explained at a somewhat breathless pace.

On the other hand, this is talky and staticly filmed, and while it sometimes rushes, other times it drags. Austin Trevor's Poirot is simply a rather conventional detective without much personality, giving the whole thing a rather generic feel.

Overall, not worth watching, even for a movie this old.

The earliest Hercule Poirot screen apperance available for us to see (Austin Trevor had already played the role twice before, but those films are lost - forever?). It's a more enjoyable film than you might expect: it moves relatively well, the plot has the classic Agatha Christie switcheroo (although the finale is very rushed), Hastings and Japp are bumbling but what else is new, and Trevor himself as Poirot is amusing and doesn't take the part overly seriously; his French accent definitely sounds like Clouseau to modern ears, but at the time it probably passed muster. Overall, the film certainly has a place in my extensive Agatha Christie collection. **1/2 out of 4.