David Suchet's interpretation of Poirot is "cool" and suits a "cool medium."
But his underplaying, which is fine in a delicate tea-cozy kind of way on a one-hour show, doesn't give much of a kick to a two-hour special. It DOES have nice location shooting. And a couple of fine performances. The local police chief is excellent, and whoever plays Dr. Leidner does a good job of looking no more than a bit distracted during the scene in which Poirot gathers all the suspects together in the room and tears Leidner's life to shreds.
But I'm used to seeing Poirot played by Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov, using impossibly comic accents and broad gestures, bringing loud presences to the big screen. It isn't that I dislike Suchet's performance. He's a marvelous actor. His "Freud" was unforgettable and he makes an engaging villain too. But seeing Finney and Ustinov so many times, it's like having listened to Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations so often that other interpretations seem rather pale.
The plot's pretty thick actually. Christie laid out the floor plan of the station in her novel so you could more easily keep track of the spatial relationships involved. At least I think she did. I might be confusing it with another of her novels. But you can still follow the thread because of the deliberate pace. It doesn't exactly rocket along.
It occurs to me that most of Christie's murders are sort of genteel. Poisons are common and all that. Nobody's brains get splattered all over the walls as they would in a good old-fashioned American detective story where a love affair is what goes on between a man and his.45.
But here was have poor Mrs. Johnson gulping down half a tumbler of poison before realizing what it is. And what is it? Nothing subtle. Hydrochloric acid which, if you have to go, is definitely NOT the best way to do it, since it will definitely frost your pyloric sphincter for you.
The character of Father Levigny was undoubtedly fashioned after the real-life Jesuit archaeologist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, who had a hand or foot in almost everything of importance at the time, winning the Legion of Honor in WWI, present at the discovery of Peking man and the fraudulent Piltdown man, conceptualizer of the noosphere, and on and on.
Anyway, this may not be the best version of a Christie mystery but I found it enjoyable.
But his underplaying, which is fine in a delicate tea-cozy kind of way on a one-hour show, doesn't give much of a kick to a two-hour special. It DOES have nice location shooting. And a couple of fine performances. The local police chief is excellent, and whoever plays Dr. Leidner does a good job of looking no more than a bit distracted during the scene in which Poirot gathers all the suspects together in the room and tears Leidner's life to shreds.
But I'm used to seeing Poirot played by Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov, using impossibly comic accents and broad gestures, bringing loud presences to the big screen. It isn't that I dislike Suchet's performance. He's a marvelous actor. His "Freud" was unforgettable and he makes an engaging villain too. But seeing Finney and Ustinov so many times, it's like having listened to Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations so often that other interpretations seem rather pale.
The plot's pretty thick actually. Christie laid out the floor plan of the station in her novel so you could more easily keep track of the spatial relationships involved. At least I think she did. I might be confusing it with another of her novels. But you can still follow the thread because of the deliberate pace. It doesn't exactly rocket along.
It occurs to me that most of Christie's murders are sort of genteel. Poisons are common and all that. Nobody's brains get splattered all over the walls as they would in a good old-fashioned American detective story where a love affair is what goes on between a man and his.45.
But here was have poor Mrs. Johnson gulping down half a tumbler of poison before realizing what it is. And what is it? Nothing subtle. Hydrochloric acid which, if you have to go, is definitely NOT the best way to do it, since it will definitely frost your pyloric sphincter for you.
The character of Father Levigny was undoubtedly fashioned after the real-life Jesuit archaeologist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, who had a hand or foot in almost everything of importance at the time, winning the Legion of Honor in WWI, present at the discovery of Peking man and the fraudulent Piltdown man, conceptualizer of the noosphere, and on and on.
Anyway, this may not be the best version of a Christie mystery but I found it enjoyable.