Too Talky and slow-moving for my taste. 👎
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It's meant to be a suspense thriller. Still Much better than the Kenneth Branaugh remake.
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MovieChat Forums > Murder on the Orient Express (1974) Discussion > Too Talky and slow-moving for my taste. ...
Nothing wrong with that.
It's exactly as talky and slow-moving as I like, personal tastes vary.
Director Sidney Lumet and his collaborators took some steps to try to remedy that.
The film opens with a weird, dream-likes summary of the events surrounding the kidnapping of a famous pilot's young son(think Lindbergh) . The scene is entirely silent, with ominous music and a tint to the film(blue, as I remember). Various people are vaguely shown in the action(one, for instance, is knocked unconsicious) and the entire sequence ends with a headline along the lines of "Child...found....DEAD." Fade out. As the film goes on , we shall see that this opening sequence is rife with visual clues to the solution of the murder now to take place on the Orient Express.
With that arresting "cinematic launch," the film can then move on to the main event: murder, interrogation and investigation on the Orient Express.
Which is where the other winning element comes in: that CAST.
It certainly was a lot easier to watch suspects being questioned when the suspects in question were Sean Connery and Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall and Anthony Perkins. The film created a "beautiful couple" in Connery and a wonderfully vivacious and beautiful Vanessa Redgrave. Perkins got to do yet another of his Norman Bates impressions(with his Psycho interrogator Martin Balsam here returned to help ask some new questions.) Bergman and Bacall in particular summoned up -- in 1974 -- the long ago glamour of the 40s and 50's, now aged and eccentric. A younger generation of stars included Michael York(fresh from new won stardom in Cabaret and The Three Musketeers) and the always-gorgeous Jaqueline Bisset as his wife. John Gielgud does his "Arthur butler" routine 7 years before winning an Oscar for it.
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And so forth and so on. If this one is better than the Branaugh remake, a key reason is that in 1974, the movies still had access to Golden Era stars like Bergman and Bacall (and Richard Widmark), along with 60s-starting stars Redgrave and Connery and Perkins and Balsam, and new 70's stars like Michael York. A few decades of movie history on that train.