The best thing about the early all-star Agatha Christie murder-mysteries ("Murder on the Orient Express" and "Death on the Nile") was their eerie glamor, a shimmering kind of evil which translated tantalizingly into murder. "Appointment With Death" has a disappointing cast, including a rather fatigued Peter Ustinov as detective Hercule Poirot, and a travelogue-styled production which doesn't lend itself well to the intimate setting of a whodunit. It's all too airy and blasé, with a set-up that rarely engages the attention. Former prison wardress Piper Laurie (camping it up) has cheated her step-children out of their late father's money and now has them all greedily at her beck and call; after a cruise from Europe to Palestine however, Big Mama Laurie ends up dead under the sun at an excavation site. Poirot's suspects include each of the disgruntled children (actually grown adults), a boasting Member of Parliament (Lauren Bacall), an archaeologist (Hayley Mills), a conniving lawyer (David Soul), the dowager's cheating daughter-in-law (Carrie Fisher), and a novice female doctor (Jenny Seagrove, who has been instructed to maintain a guilt-ridden look throughout). John Gielgud is utterly wasted as a Colonel, while Ustinov wheezes and grimaces his way along. Michael Winner is responsible for the shapeless direction, which includes halving Poirot's final summation into two separate sequences for no other purpose than to bide some time. * from ****
Review of Appointment with Death
