jeffreyfrankel

This is a great film. Jaqueline Bisset is perfect for the role of the German countess. It shows the horror of the war years and the courage of a few who saved Jews from death. The apartment they are living in seems a bit ramshackle and it is difficult to believe they were undiscovered by the occasional German officials who presumably had reasons to believe she was hiding someone. At times she and her Jewish lover come close to being caught, but they survive.

I have seen the version with David Suchet as Poirot twice. I find Albert Finney makes a mockery of Poirot. Even though Poirot is seen as a "frog" or "Frenchie" Suchet gives him a seriousness and moral character suited for the story. The list of first rate actors does not stop the film being second rate, since Poirot is the main character and drives the film. A silly character in the way Finney portrays Poirot cannot make the film believable, whereas Suchet does make the film believable. It is good to see Sean Connery and at an early stage in his career. I also found the early scenes in Istanbul with street sellers pestering foreigners a caricature of what really happened in those days. Usually the sellers had the good sense to allow one seller at a time to make their sales pitch to the foreigner, because they knew four or five around the foreigner would not make it possible to get a sale. Sidney Lumet understood New York, but did not understand Poirot or Istandul.

In the last scene the hitman, who up till then never let people see he had a gun until he meets his target alone, enters a night club, goes up to the pianist, and takes a gun out. Why do something so stupid? More than a dozen people saw him.

We never find out why he had to kill the manager/owner of the night club at the beginning of the film. After this killing he allows himself to be picked up by the police in his original clothes - he made no effort to change his appearance. For some reason after he steals a car he goes to a back street mechanic to get the number plates changed, yet he only uses the car for one day and one job. In addition after every job he gets rid of the gun, he never kills more than one person with the gun.

Here was a man who earned large sums of money as a hit man, yet he lived in a seedy apartment in Paris.

Definitely worth watching but not a lesson in how to be a hit man.