Spoiled by Suchet

I was raised watching the Suchet series so I too am very fond of them. Apart from the actual acting I'd also like to add that as frenchman, I found Finney's accent sounded nothing like a french accent, it even got ridiculous when he spoke french because it sounded like a hungarian speaking french.

I like Suchet's Poirot, but like Finney the most.

Not to quibble too much with Suchet's interpretation, but I find his character a bit too sympathetic and at times too easy to identify with. It is probably better suited for the tv format, but not proper for Poirot. Poirot is supposed to be very different and there needs to be a certain distance between us and him, whereby we even lean towards not liking him. There is a reason why he is not the narrator of the stories.

Finney accomplishes this distance very well. Notice that in this film it is very much the ordinary individuals with whom we better identify, while Poirot is an eccentric and brilliant mind outside of our grasp. The tv series is the opposite; often it is Poirot who seems to be caught in a crowd of absurd people (check out "murder on the links").

I think the series gets it backwards. But I understand the challenges with the format.

I know this is five years old, but I can't help but wonder how you feel about the Suchet version of Orient Experss.

--
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I was never a great Poirot fan -I'm more of a Columbo person- even though I love Agatha Christie's world, so maybe I'm biased. But I don't think Finney's performance was so bad, compared to Ustinov's or Suchet's. Different, yes. But for a definite part, he pulled it off well, in my opinion. Anyway, I much prefer this movie to the TV version recently made with Suchet, which was somehow bizarre.

" You ain't running this place, Bert, WILLIAMS is!" Sgt Harris

While not particularly pleased with Suchet's Poirot neither am I exactly taken with Finney's. Albert Finney is a favorite of mine but here I find him given to overacting and his semi-hunchback portrayal of Poirot mystifies me. I must also say that as a longtime voracious reader of Agatha Christie I do not ever recall meeting Finney's Poirot in any of her work.



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Watched this movie last night, you are spot on. I have to learn not to trust the IMDB ratings...

Suchet is fine, but a little bit too serious at times. Finney nailed the part. He let the humor of the character come through.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I absolutely agree with everyone who says Finney is completely terrible in the role. He seems to be doing a bad caricature, what with all the sinking of the head under the shoulders and then twisting his eyes up all the time. Also, too angry, unlikeable, and devoid of charm. And I thought exactly this BEFORE I saw any of Suchet's episodes (I might have caught snippets as a kid, but never complete ones). Shortly after seeing this I saw Death on the Nile and MUCH preferred Ustinov's portrayal. He may look less like Christie's Poirot, but his performance was very natural and believable.

However, to me that's a testament on how good this movie really is, as even loathing the central performance I ADORE it to pieces. Everything else is spot-on, the cast is perfectly selected (even Widmark, who might be too old but did the gangster-trying-to-pass-as-a-gentleman thing very believably), the cinematography and camera work is top-notch (that shot of the train departing!), the music is just wonderful, the resolution blew me away, both in concept (Dame Agatha's merit, of course) and cinematic execution, and overall it had me glued to the screen the whole time, which is strange as I usually find Sidney Lumet's films quite boring. As much as I vastly prefer Ustinov's portrayal, his movies as pure cinema are vastly inferior to this one. And Suchet? Great portrayal, but they're TV episodes and it shows. Not much cinematic merit in them.

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